A Terrifying Experience in the Night

Originally posted 2006-06-08 02:56:35

Just before 5:00 this morning, my daughters’ screams ripped me from sleep. I have two sons and three daughters. The boys fight and the girls scream. That’s just what they do. So screaming girls shouldn’t startle me.

These screams, however, differed from the usual \”Give me back my shirt!\” or \”No, you can’t use my doll as home plate!\” screams. These were horror flick screams: blood-curdling, ear-shattering, abject-terror-my-life-is-ending screams. As I leapt from bed, my first thought was that one of my daughters had fallen from bed, landed awkwardly on a toy, and grotesquely broken her back. The three girls share a bedroom and have bunkbeds. They all usually sleep on the bottom bunk, however, as they did last night, so that scenario didn’t seem likely.

My next thought chilled me: an intruder. As I raced behind my wife to my daughters’ room, I became convinced that I’d find an evil kidnapper. I tried to figure out how to get to the room first, before my wife, heedless of the fact that I was half-awake, weaponless, and protected only by my underwear. I had no opportunity, however, to pass a momma bear protecting her cubs, and we both raced to thwart whatever was terrorizing our babies. As we arrived at their room almost simultaneously, I searched furiously for some drug-addled addict while my daughters continued to pound my skull with their screams. I saw no one. Nothing. Then I looked where my wife was pointing on the floor, halfway across the room from where my daughters cowered in bed, screaming and clutching each other. It was a centipede. A scrap of toilet paper and a quick flush thwarted the would-be criminal.

Let’s see . . . how do I relate this to technology . . . got it. Do your utmost to keep your code issue-free. Like my daughters, customers tend to overreact to bugs.