My husband snores. Perhaps your significant other snores, too. Mine denies that he’s snoring. Bruce emphatically states that he’s “just breathing.” Yet, some nights the sound is so loud, you can hear it from the foyer, one floor below.
I wouldn’t mind the snoring so much if it were a steady, gentle sound, like a whispering wind or lapping waves at the ocean. But, what I listen to each night is more like a chain saw gone awry or Darth Vader in the death throes of bronchitis. What’s worse, though, is the quiet, “Pfft…pfft…pfft…gasp, gasp” followed by a long silence, during which I feel obliged to check if Bruce is still alive.
Remedies? Well, it’s hard to work with someone who is in Snoring Denial. You have to be sneaky. I’ve run a humidifier in our room, bought him a snore-proof (not!) wedge pillow and on several occasions, hovered over him with one of those breathe-right plastic strips, trying to slip it across his nose without waking him. On one grim night, I hovered over his head with a large pillow. But then, I considered how much I’d hate prison food and with my luck, how I’d be stuck in a jail block with hundreds of thunderous snorers.
Why not send him to an ENT, you might ask? Well, the problem with a snorer in denial is that he simply does not believe there is a problem. Therefore, I needed to prove to him the existence of a problem. So, one night, Android in hand, I used the audio application to record not one, not two, but four varieties of Bruce snoring. Surely, if he heard himself, he’d be motivated to rectify the situation.
The next day when I played the recording for Bruce, he ignored the obvious sonorous evidence. Instead, he focused on the fact that I’d invaded his privacy. My “desperate times require desperate measures” speech did not move him. In retrospect, I had to admit, he had a point. I shouldn’t have done it. Ultimately, he forgave me and I continued slogging through my sleep-deprived life.
One morning, several weeks later, as I worked on my computer in my study at the front of our house, I heard strange noises coming from our kitchen at the back of our house. Who could it be? No one was home but my sedentary Golden Retriever, Cassie, who lay languishing at my feet.
Was it an intruder? Maybe I could scare him. I whispered, “Bark, Cassie, bark.” She rolled over on her back, hoping to be scratched.
Should I just run out the front door? Curiosity got the best of me. I eased down the hallway. As I crept closer to the kitchen, I heard a halting, gasping sound. An asthmatic burglar?
I poked my head around the door. Nobody in the kitchen, dining room or, as far as I could see, in the family room. But the sound continued. Should I hightail back down the hall and out the front door?
But then, I noticed my smart phone on the kitchen counter, my smart phone which from now on I will refer to as my “smart ass” phone. Was the breathing sound coming from the phone? Oh yes, it was. Apparently, on its own, with nobody selecting anything, the phone began to play all the recordings in its archive which included the four varieties of Bruce snoring.
A couple of days later, the phone repeated its performance, only this time from a less scary place: the inside of my purse. When I called the Android provider, they said, “Oh yes, that recording application has a few bugs.”
So, what’s the moral of this story? Maybe that the ends do not justify the means, especially when the ends are not achieved. Or, maybe it’s that the Universe does have a sense of humor, after all.
