A Rude Awakening

The harsh sound of the door bell mixed with the shrill ring of the cell-phone! Believe me, there is no worse sound in this world than these two indulging in tandem singing (If there is no such thing, well, imagine some such thing from the words 'tandem' and singing'). Before you disagree and say 'finger nails on blackboard', let me tell you that this is worse. Especially when you are sleeping.

Today is Sunday. Sunday is weekend. A day off. This is my 'laze around the house getting bored' day of the week. There I was, peacefully sleeping in the morning, before being brutally dragged out of bliss and thrown into reality. My reflexes worked faster than the rest of me by reaching out and trying to switch off the alarm. That's when it permeated into my drugged-with-sleep mind that it wasn't the alarm. Rather, it was the above mentioned cacophonous duet. The only way to mute the jangle was to answer both the phone and the door-bell. I reached for the cell phone and at the same time, tried to get out of bed to answer the summons at the door. But that didn't happen exactly that way. During the night, I had somehow managed to expertly wrap myself up in my blanket to resemble a mummy (the old, Egyptian variety) and though I got myself out of bed I couldn't get my legs working the way they were designed to work. Result - Butt met tiled floor. Ouch!

So why did I have to go through with this ordeal first thing on a Sunday morning? Who was at the door? Who had called on the cell-phone?

After I managed to de-mummify myself from the blanket and get back to my feet, I noticed that it was my dad on the cell-phone. And I opened the door to find my mom leaning on the door bell hoping to extract every last ounce of performance from it. With my dad standing behind her! They were just trying all the options they had to wake me up as early as possible because they knew that otherwise they would have to spend half the day standing outside, waiting for me to wake up.

I don't blame them. I am a heavy sleeper, they had to do it. But that still is the worst sound I have ever heard.