I snore so I’ve been told. I snore loudly very loudly. It has
never bothered me, because I’m asleep when I do it and it’s no big deal when
you sleep alone which is how I have slept for the last four plus years.
My snoring is also transient, in that sometimes I have been told
it is unbelievable the volume and the duration of my rattlings, and sometimes
it is absent. The biggest factor years ago was my drinking if I had been
drinking I was told the amount of snoring increased and if I hadn’t been
drinking it might be absent altogether.
Another factor was my level of exhaustion; if I was really tired
when I went to bed, I was really going to snore. So if I went to work at the
firehouse hung-over and exhausted it was going to long night for my crew.
So back in those days if I had gone out to the clubs with some
of the boys, got drunk and maybe gone home with a nice lady I met, It was guaranteed
that I was going shake the windows in the bedroom at the firehouse the next
day.
On those days or nights, I should say when I woke up my bed and
the floor around my bed would be littered with dozens of coat hangers. My crews
had taken to bringing a hand full of coat hangers to bed with them and during
the night when I got going they would simply hurl a coat hanger across the room
and bean me with it.
I guess it was a pretty successful method based on the number of
coat hangers on the floor and me. It was somewhat inconvenient when we got an
alarm in the middle of the night and I had to negotiate a pile of wire hangers,
more than once I ended up face planting before I could get out of the bedroom.
In an effort to reduce personal injuries and to accommodate the
rest of my co-workers, we experimented with alterative solutions. The first
idea was I would warn the boys when I was getting ready to go to bed. It seemed
if they could get to sleep before I did, they had a good chance of sleeping
through my snoring.
Of course it never occurred to me that if I didn’t get so drunk
on my days off there wouldn’t have been an issue. But that wasn’t going to
happen, my first marriage had come to a painful end and drinking and chasing women
was the only treatment I knew for a broken heart.
The go to bed before me tactic worked fairly well except for
when we got a call at night. When we returned to the station and went back to
bed I had the ability to fall asleep again almost immediately, which was a good
thing for me, but not so much for my crew. I would wake up again buried in a
sea of coat hangers.
So I got in the habit of just going to the TV lounge and
sleeping in a lazboy recliner after calls, it spared the crew and it spared me
from the occasional black eye.
Now I wasn’t always the worst offender, in many stations I was maybe
2nd or even 3rd on the depth charts of nocturnal rattlers.
There were guys that put me to shame in my snoring abilities.
One Captain I worked with had sleep apnea, I don’t know if you
are familiar with sleep apnea but it is truly terrifying to witness. The sufferer
actually stops breathing for a period of time (in his case it was every 32
seconds because I used to lay in my bed and time him) until the body takes over
and reacts to the lack of oxygen.
The reaction was much like, what I imagined it must sound like
when a drowning person gets their first breath of air after being under water too
long. It was petrifying the noises that came out of this man, horrifying sounds
of gasping, gurgling, chocking, and some wheezing mixed in just to make sure
you would be off balance.
And he did it every 32 seconds; he was another guy that we would
try to beat to bed.
I’d ask, “Hey Cap are you getting tired yet?”
“Maybe, why TimO you trying to beat me to bed?” He’d ask.
You see he was completely unremorseful about his condition, he
was the Captain, and he didn’t give a shit if we were losing sleep, he was fine,
and that was all that mattered.
It finally got so bad that he was about to have a mutiny on his
hands, guys were trying to get out and go to other stations and some were getting
down right insubordinate about it, they were so mad about not getting their
rest, that a compromise had to be made. The solution was to build a wall across
one end of the bedroom that blocked off about ten feet of the room and move the
Captain in to his very own mini bedroom; it also doubled as a gym.
So we had either a gym in the Captain’s bedroom or a bed in the
gym. It didn’t matter either way because the Captain was out of our bedroom and
in his own. Still the wall only provided a slight reduction in the decibels
generated by the Cap, but it was enough to maintain harmony and stop the
rebellion.
