Wednesday night featured a horrible nightmare sequence. I hoped that last night’s sleep would be an improvement.

I hoped in vain.

Around midnight I took a call from the office. One of the broadcast studios suffered from two different problems, one computer unable to get into email and another unable to use the mouse. The email problem was easy to fix (by virtue of actually logging in to the network), but the mouse problem stumped the overnight guy and me. What’s more, upon investigation we discovered that at least one of the other similar computers elsebuilding also couldn’t respond to mouse input. The common denominator turned out to be the news server, so I had the overnight guy reboot that, then reboot the affected workstations. Voila, that was it!

It only took half an hour to get to that point, and then another half hour to get back to sleep.

Around 4:30am the smoke alarms went off. Wait, I don’t think I described that accurately enough. Let me try again. Around 4:30am, a pair of piercing sirens wailed at earsplitting decibel levels… for about three seconds. “Okay,” I thought, once I could string two syllables together in my adrenaline-spiked mind. “What the hell?” But the alarms stayed silent. That is, they stayed silent for about three minutes, then went off… again only for a few seconds. This took place no less than four times over the course of half an hour. We investigated the house to no avail. We found nothing burning, nothing at all that could remotely be considered a cause for this behaviour on the part of the smoke detectors. By 5:00am they’d had their fun, apparently, because we didn’t hear a peep out of them afterward.

Another half hour of fun, but it took me a lot longer than just another half hour to get back to sleep.

Look, just because it’s almost All Hallow’s Eve doesn’t mean there’s an open invitation for bogeymen, sandmen or spectres in my house, thankyouverymuch. This sort of nonsense can stop, now. Please.

I need my beauty sleep, after all.