A cell phone trick…

Bailey waits for a phone call

In continuation from yesterday’s post, its 5 pm and I have only been up for MY Thursday for two hours. That’s because I went to bed around 10 AM…

My husband was back in town and ready for me to come pick him up from the bus around 6 AM. Since I’m a night owl, I found it easier to just wait up for him than to go to bed and sleep a couple of hours before going to pick him up.

As you can imagine, this meant getting caught in morning traffic through downtown Nashville… twice. Making a usual hour-trip closer to two hours in stop-and-go traffic. And, of course, we got home and both were too wired from driving in traffic to go straight to sleep.

When we went to bed, I silently prayed that the phone would not ring and wake us up early.

It did ring around 2:30 pm with a telemarketer. I suppose I should be grateful, because had they NOT randomly pulled our number out of a hat, I’d have probably slept until more like… well… I’d still be sleeping. But instead, of course, I grumbled and cursed under my breath for my sleep being interrupted.

Then I remembered an old cell phone trick I used to do when I’d work much more regularly in a bar downtown. I’d get home around 4 AM, and by the time I went to bed I knew my phone could easily be ringing by 9 AM while I was trying to sleep. The easy answer: turn the phone OFF. My rebuttal: I don’t ever want to be unable to be reached should anyone in my family have an emergency.

I have special ring tones for my family and closest friends.  For example, my husband’s ring is the song we danced to at our wedding. (Awwww… right?) Other ring tones include  “Small Town Kid” by Eli Young Band and Pat Green’s “I Like Texas.” There are others, but I’ll leave you with that to marvel in my phone geekiness style.

I figured out that if I set my “default ring” to silent (or the case of my current phone, the quietest notification sound), my specialty ringtones would still ring loudly. So instead of silencing my phone or turning it off to avoid being bothered while I sleep, I can rest easy knowing that in an emergency my family can still reach me but other random calls would not bother me.

Now a key thing is that upon getting up, you can’t forget to change your default ringtone back to your normal setting!  But that little trick came in handy countless times in the past, and any time my husband and I have one of these wackier-than-usual sleep days, I’ll be putting that trick back into service.