My Lonely City

So my phone, which is my alarm clock – which I’ve cleverly begun putting in the bathroom, to make myself get up to turn it off, and thus make myself much more likely to get up when it goes off – went off an hour early this morning. Not because I’d mis-set it, but because the police – yes, the police – were trying to get hold of my husband. Before this goes in all sorts of wrong directions, it was because the garage door was open at our office, and our cell phones were the only listed numbers they could find for people with our last name in the area. Um, my last name is Morgan. It’s pretty common. Hm. Anyway, 4:00 a.m. To tell us about a garage door five miles away. Here’s the (funny, to me, now) exchange:

Phone: bzzz, bzzz …

Me: (in my twisted little mind) Gah! Giant retail hanger-fetcher poles trying to disassemble the universe! (waking up a bit more) Mmm… morning … WTF, it’s four o’clock – I have another hour, you stupid phone (out loud) Um, hello?

Official-but-pleasant-sounding Lady: Hello. This is (something-something), with the Moore Police Department; I’m looking for Jared Morgan.

Me: …. um, he’s asleep right now?

OBPS Lady: Does he work at (our office address, or perhaps an address in Timbuktu for all I knew)?

Me: Yes? Um? (picturing twenty-foot-high flames engulfing our office, the CAD prints I’ve been falling asleep over reduced to gratifying flakes of ash … )

OBPS Lady, with considerably more patience than I probably deserved: Could you wake him up please?

Me: Okay?

(wake up my husband, give him the phone, let the cats in, turn the light on …

Jared: The garage door. At the office. It’s broken.

Me: Okay.

Us: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……………..