Sleep

A Thousand Curses To The Text-Spamming SOB Who Woke Me Up

I want to punch these spammers in the face. Hard. While holding a can of Spam.

I had high hopes for today. It’s sunny. It’s my husband’s one day off. My son was coming over for breakfast and we were having a birthday lunch with a friend and his family. I wanted to catch up on laundry and housework, bake some bread, hit the grocery store and maybe even work on the yard a bit.

The day’s possibilities were screwed when a text woke me up at 4:38 a.m.

No, it wasn’t a scary notification that something terrible had happened to a loved one. It was a spam text with nothing but random question marks and a link I knew better than to click. For this, my day is sacrificed.

When you have abnormal sleep cycles, you guard your sleep as well as you can. Deep sleep is necessary to your life and health. I know having fewer periods of deep sleep is detrimental to my physical and mental health, but there isn’t anything I can do. I’ve had sleep studies. I take melatonin. I’ve tried multiple prescription sleep medications. I’ve experimented with different diets. I’ve tried tiring myself out with hard physical exertion. You name it, I have tried it. I usually fall asleep quickly and easily, but even if I do manage to sleep through the night — which is far from common — I spend too little time in deep sleep and too much time in REM sleep. I never wake up refreshed.

Even people without sleep issues tend to feel unwell when they’re awakened from a deep sleep. Take that feeling times a thousand when you do have sleep issues. I couldn’t really enjoy my son’s visit, because all I could think about was how tired I was. The birthday lunch was fun, but when we got back home, I went to bed.

I did not really sleep, however. It was too sunny and bright, and my mind was wide awake even though my body felt deeply fatigued. It’s an unpleasant feeling to wish to be doing things but to be physically wiped out. I drifted around in shallow sleep for a bit and then gave up. I’ll just try to go to bed super early tonight.

Although I wish to send back an angry rant, I know better than to reply to these messages. I block them, but it does no good. They send each new text from a new random number. I googled what settings I should change on my phone, but I had already appropriately adjusted everything. I’ve looked into spam blockers, but some seem sketchy and in some reviews, people said they just got more phone calls. I am already on the no-call list.

I’m advised to just turn my phone off at night. Or use a setting that doesn’t allow calls/messages from unknown callers. But there’s a good reason why I’ll never do that.

If you’ve ever gotten one of those scary middle-of-the-night calls, you’ll understand why I don’t want to do that. Once you’ve gotten a midnight call from an emergency room doctor telling you your child has been badly injured, you will never want to turn your phone off again. My daughter was badly burned while off at college. The doctor told me were taking her by ambulance to a different hospital with an intensive care burn unit. Imagine if I’d woken up in the morning, turned on my phone and then learned my daughter had spent the entire night in the hospital without being able to reach me. Nope. The phone stays on.

The sense of rage and hatred I feel at these spammers can’t be described. Some months ago, I was getting scads of these messages every day. They eventually stopped. I don’t know if this one is a one-off or the beginning of another onslaught.

This is like someone being allowed to break into my house every night and wake me up. It’s insane that our government and phone carriers have not done something to actually deal with this problem. I want to punch these spammers in the face. Hard. While holding a can of Spam.

If anybody out there has a great solution for dealing with spammers — or for spending more time in deep sleep — that would be amazing.