I’m in Hattiesburg this weekend. I hadn’t ever pictured myself having a need to travel to Hattiesburg until I realized Southern Miss is in our conference. The only thing I ever knew about Southern Miss is that I’m pretty sure it’s Brett Favre’s home town.
We arrived yesterday and played our game. It ruled. Our pitcher threw a complete game with 13 strikeouts which was awesome. Only, it further complicates my “no cheering in the pressbox” rule that I have to abide by. A guy doubles his career-high strikeouts in a game and I can’t cheer. [sigh]. It’s hard.
But I did it.
Then I came back to the HGI where were are staying and I did my post-game deal. Then I went to sleep. And THEN, at approximately 3:50am I woke up. Not of my own volition mind you. The fire alarm went off. And it was LOUD. And it had a strobe. Dear God, we practically had strokes. I managed to slide my flip flops on and grab my phones and we shuffled into the hall where the entire team looked about as happy to be awakened in the middle of the night as I was. We all went down the stairs (silently and not-so-silently cursing the whole situation) only to reach the outside, where the alarm turned off. We trudged back upstairs and tried to fall asleep.
It was not the highlight of my night.
The best part was at breakfast this morning, when you get to hear the stories.
One person tried to punch the thermostat, thinking, in his disoriented state, that the alarm would going off if the temperature was lowered in the room. He walked outside into the hall and came back in, only to see his roommate holding three pillows to his ears.The mere mental image of this made me giggle.
Another person slept right through it. Luckily, his roommate woke him up so in the event of a real emergency, he’d have been safe. Now that’s a teammate. In defense of said sleeping person, he had just thrown a complete game victory with 13 strikeouts and was probably a little tired. I’m just sayin.
Someone else announced he had decided he was not leaving his room until his saw smoke. He is stubborn and slightly fearless that way, so that mentality checks out.
One person wanted to text our ops person and find out how to make the alarm stop as if she controlled that. In the morning, he realized that was not within her power but somehow, last night in his state of half-consciousness, he figured her to be a magician.
Something I did learn about myself is that I’m surprising calm when a buzzer the same decibel as a jet engine is ringing at me. I methodically grabbed the important items and was not frantic. Which was a pleasant surprise because I had always thought I would more on the frantic side during the course of something like that in the middle of the night. Maybe my not-fully-awake state played a role. The only thing is that I didn’t grab my wallet. Tactical error in the event of a real emergency. But I did get my roommate squared away, helping her find pants to throw over her PJs and we were out the door. Grumpy at the fact that we were awake in the middle of the night, but out the door.
So that’s been day/night one in Hattiesburg. I’m hoping for another victory today and a solid, uninterupted night’s sleep during day/night two.
We were visiting Grandam Sal & Poppy – sorry we missed your call. After reading the above, I did not want to call you too late.