DO you wake up in a cold sweat, imagining you heard one of the many awful sounds of waking life? These will ruin your beauty sleep:
An email notification
While being contacted by work in any capacity is horrifying, this cheerful email tone always reminds you of the 4.59-on-a-Friday request asking you to come in early on Monday morning to have a serious chat about some poorly-formatted spreadsheets. It ruins evenings, weekends and your sanity.
A cancelled train announcement
That sickening three note xylophone melody must have been composed by a sadist as it sounds so optimistic and yet is always a harbinger of doom. You’re still traumatised by the time you spent four hours shivering on a train platform is Stevenage because of a light dusting of snow on the line.
Laughing teenagers
The sound of a group of sniggering teens is one of the most mentally distressing things a person can hear. It takes you right back to the misery and horror of your secondary school days and usually presages the realisation that your skirt is tucked into your tights, or you look over 30.
A bin lorry
The deafening noise of the bin men arriving at 6 in the morning is the perfect reminder that, no, you haven’t put the bins out and, yes, this is the second week in the row that you’ve forgotten and your partner is going to go f**king berserk. It’s especially awful if you live near a bottle bank and you’ve got a hangover.
Fireworks
Waking to a series of loud bangs is a frightening experience, but luckily it was just a dream and you can settle back down to sleep. Oh, actually, no, you can’t because it’s the end of October, those bangs were local kids letting off fireworks at 2.30 am and they’re going to be doing it for another three weeks.
