A dentist asking you “Is it safe?” while reclined in the chair at the, and said dentist is manipulating all manner of instruments in your mouth.
At least yours go chirp chirp. Ours go bip. One single bip, lasting all of a half second. Nowhere near long enough to triangulate just which alarm it is. Then it’s ten or fifteen or twenty minutes until the next bip, depending solely on the alarm’s whim, it seems. There’s no sleep to be had as long as I know there’s another bip in the offing, somewhere, sometime.
On a related subject, one noise I hope I never hear again is the sound of someone incessantly popping bubble wrap as I slowly come awake. Turned out it wasn’t bubble wrap. It was the neighbor’s house on fire.
The sound of running water when you open the front door of a house you know** is empty. Especially if it’s new and you built it!
I respond to random noises outside that wake me up with a sidearm and a LED light headband [I have startled the bejesus of deer grazing by the door to the barn more times =)] because 1-august 2015 my house was torched while we were inside. I had to clump out past a wall that was starting to burn through. I have fire based PTSD now. 2-the head of the bed on the top floor of the barn is more or less above where we have the propane tank for our heaters in the barn. There are few windows in a barn … 3-I am now paranoid about being torched in my sleep by the guy coming back to ‘finish’ what he started. We are the only arson place with the owners still more or less onsite living. If he was clearing people out, we would still be a target [in my poor mind]
I actually have always responded to random outside night noises, when we still had critters night shooting got me more feral dogs … plus mrAru spent a fair amount of time deployed or temporarily stationed somewhere for a school or for refits.
“Hey fellas, come look at this!” … your auto mechanic to his co-workers, after lifting the hood.
The first time I heard a red fox scream at night, in the field behind our house, I was sure someone was being dismembered, or worse. Once I learned what it was, I then noticed that almost every episode of Midsomer Murders included that cry as a sound effect. The closed captioning never correctly identified it, though.
Who else was it who was visiting your sister, then?
The sound of my company phone ringing in the night. I have been off of the on call list for twelve years. When my phone rings in the night it is always something drastic going on and I know I will be getting dressed and going to a client site for a massive problem.
Definitely the cat barfing and car alarms.
I’m also misophonic and the way some of my co-workers eat… I have actually left the break room and sat in the women’s bathroom until it was time to clock in because it was that or physically attack them while screaming SHUT UP.
WHen my dad, who sometimes doesn’t hear you clearly, says “huh?” The way he enunciated it makes me stabby.
I have to ask, because no one else has:
YOUR HOUSE WAS TORCHED? And they haven’t caught the person who did it?
I had a house in the country. I walked outside one morning to hear a ‘ssssssss’ coming from the my well’s pressure tank. My immediate thought was, “that’s an expensive sound.” And it was: $1000 later I had a new one installed and the old one hauled away.
Even worse if you hear it from your vasectomy surgeon. <snip:eek:>
Being awakened at 0600 by a loud boom followed by a loudspeaker repeating in English then Spanish that the cops are there and everyone in the house needs to come out with their hands up. Figured out the boom was a flashbang (at first assumed the transformer station down the street had had an oopsie) and thankfully the announcements were not followed by a hail of gunfire because based on the address they were specifying in the announcement there was only one house in between the target and my bedroom window. That was fun!
Running water. I had a flood a few years back and hearing unexpected running water will give me a full scale panic attack in about 14 picoseconds.
Yup. The fire inspector for the town decided it was accidental or something … despite it started on the top surface of the insulating cover to the hot tub that was empty, and unplugged [waiting for a pump part]. Roomie was starting to walk out to go to the demi-legal studio in the barn when she started screaming FIRE … I was already awake, mrAru was sound asleep as it was midnight. She grabbed the cat and stuffed her in the car with me, mrAru grabbed the conure and cage and stuffed it in the van with her, grabbed both fire extinguishers and tried to knock it down but it was already starting to burn through the back wall as I crutched my way out [faster than dealing with the wheelchair, I was slung about with the bail out backpack and a backpack loaded with both of our sets of medications, phones and chargers and my tablet] She called the fire department and I called the insurance company. The inspector thought it was suspicious that 5 minutes after moving the car to someone elses driveway I was on the phone to the insurance company. I guess it didn’t sink in that 1 - I previously worked for our insurance company and 2 my first day on the job after finishing training was 9/12/2001 and they loaded us onto a bus and took us down to a few blocks from the tower site to do claims. A house is nothing compared to the poor person that had just lost all 49 people in his office in 5 minutes. I should put up some pictures of the inside … it literally was 3 feet deep in lightly cooked possessions, well crisped possessions and blackened charcoal that used to be possessions delicately seasoned with blackened powdered fibreglass insulation and ashes. Houses are piles of tinder filled with people and possessions :\ just waiting for a fire to start. mrAru jokes that our next house will be rebar reinforced concrete with metal furniture and a fire supression system. I could go for that =)
We have hopes that after 6 fires they might find something … someone DIED in the most current one so now the STATE fire inspector is working on it. Personally, I have a suspicion the local fire inspector either knows the person or is the person …
In the early 90s, I was commuting to a client near that airport. The first time I flew, we were not warned and that is a TERRIFYING sensation. The next time, the pilots actually got on the loudspeaker beforehand to explain what was going on, and encouraged us to contact Congress to try to get the abatement rules overturned because they really did NOT like having to fly that way. For those not in the know, there is some very pricey real estate near that airport and the rich folks didn’t iike being disturbed.
My “bad sound” isn’t a sound, per se, it’s a phone call in which the caller’s first sentence is “I’m okay”.
Translation: they are lying. My husband did this to me when he was on a ski trip (he had broken his knee). My son did this to me last fall about midnight when he’d just gotten back from the ER getting his chin sutured back together (fire drill at his apartment; he was dozing, and in his haste to get out of the building he tripped and gashed it).
I really don’t mind either, because their food costs over $40 a bag. You want already eaten food? Have at it!
heh try explaining to a little kid that the sound that woke him up wasn’t his cats fighting … they were mating (which honestly sounds like cats fighting) … i just made an excuse and warned the mom she was going to have kittens in about a month or so …
that few moments of dead silence when you know you just fell off the damn ladder and realize its gonna hurt …
And they do make a breathing sounds if you find them hidden during mid-day. The most bizarre sound I’ve ever heard. Like a really, really tiny diesel engine through a high pass filter.
One thing I hate is the few seconds after hearing loud thuds or thunks in another part of the house, waiting for a scream or a call for help. If it doesn’t come, but then I have to check and see if the source of the sound is conscious.