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11
Aug 03
Mon

Even Fedex Doesn’t Do Midnight

Dave and I lost a chunk of sleep last night. Someone buzzed our doorbell at abour 12.30am, which is not a completely unusual occurrence, save for the fact that we weren’t expecting anyone. I picked up the handset which links with the speaker at the front entrance to our apartment complex and was greeted by a foreign voice on the other end of the line. It was a rather strange voice. A woman’s – strange accent of undiscernable origin with a very trembly/warbly tenor – not trembly as you’d find in the elderly (she sounded middle-aged), but more a peculiar, anxious type of trembly. Anyway, she intoned that she was after a certain address, which wasn’t ours, so I just told Her that she had the wrong address. Hearing nothing else on the other end, I hung up.

Now, this requires a bit of contextualisation to understand why what happened next makes us seem like a bunch of pansies. At the time the doorbell rang, Dave and I were watching this rather surreal B-grade thriller/horror flick on the TV. We’d tuned in half way to find that this stewardess was wandering around a plane in which everyone had mysteriously died (thus leaving the plane pilotless). Unfortunate timing, given the mood it set.

The doorbell rang again, and I decided to ignore it – I told Her once already it was the wrong address. Our doorbell is such that it will ring continuously as long as the button is depressed. A few seconds later, the doorbell rang again and kept ringing until Dave got annoyed and went to answer it.

“No you’ve got the wrong address… what? A parcel? You what? … Hey Stu she wants to deliver a parcel.”
“A parcel?! At this hour, you gotta be kidding, tell her to come back another day.”
“Err, can you come back at another time? … Really? … She says she came yesterday afternoon already.”
“Huh? Whatever, who in their right mind goes around making deliveries at 12.30 in the morning?”
“Look we don’t know anything about a delivery, can you come back at a reasonable hour? What? … Hey she says she wants to talk with us.”
“Man, this sounds dodgy, tell her to get lost.”
“No thanks, come again, good bye.”

A few moments later, the bell rang again, but we ignored it. So now we were a little spooked, because the situation was turning bizarre. Over the next full hour, the doorbell rang sporadically and Dave and I began to get increasingly edgy. Nothing good could come out of this. It wasn’t long before we could hear the loony downstairs buzzing other apartments as well. Luckily, no one let Her into the building. Dave remarked that while he was speaking with the mystery woman that he heard other voices in the background. We decided to go to sleep, but had the slight problem of the racket the doorbell was making. Since we were too chicken to tramp out onto the balcony, wave a dragonboat oar about and yell, “You want some of this, bitch?! Keep ringing that doorbell and we’ll come down and give you some!!”, we ended up taping down the phonehook, smothering the receiver with two towels and shoving the whole lot into a gym bag so we didn’t have to put up with the infernal buzzing noise. Then I called a friend who lived across the road, waking him up in the process, and asked him if he could see the person at our door from his balcony. Unforunately, neither he nor we had a clear line of sight down to the front entrance. If someone had let her into the apartment complex, we’d have called the cops, but luckily it didn’t come down to that. Dave borrowed one of the oars from my room for “protection”, and then we eventually got to sleep.

  10:54pm (GMT +10.00)  •  Life  •   •  Tweet This  •  Comments (2)

This post has 2 comments

1.  Zeffe

I thought Aussies were tough? Come on guys go lay down the law :)

2.  eadwine

you guys should have called the cops straight man.

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