Domestic Vuvuzelas

For a while now I’ve been waking up before my alarm. I don’t need to tell you how spectacularly awful this is – everyone is familiar with the overwhelming anger one feels upon discovering there’s still 10 good minutes in which you could have enjoyed being unconscious. Instead you get to spend those 10 minutes with your eyes clenched shut, willing yourself to get your money’s worth of bed time (or trying to return to the absurd, but erotic dream you’d been enjoying), and then just as slumber decides to take hold you’re ripped back into reality by your alarm.

My first alarm (there are 2) goes off at 4:30am, so needless to say I found it incomprehensible that my body would actually choose to be awake any earlier than that.

After a while I realized it was an odd sound that occurred each morning at precisely 4:20am that was spring-boarding me into yet another new day. The noise was so very foreign that I couldn’t actually peg it. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? Was it that woman next door having particularly loud sex again?

This probably would have remained one of life’s less important mysteries, except that I ended up waking up even earlier the other day and hearing something much more recognizable, and annoying. The honking sound of a pre-dawn bird delighting in the silence of the wee hours by filling said silence. Then I heard what has been waking me up every morning for the last month, and I knew.

It was a Vuvuzela.

To the fortunate who are unfamiliar with the instrument, it sounds like a million monotone matronly women yelling at you to stop running, filtered through a fog horn, and it looks like this.


The world knows them as the scourge of World Cup football events, and I know them as perfectly weighted alternatives to baseball bats, especially when you’re a 7 year old entertaining yourself by smashing the crap out of Moreton Bay seed pods.

Apparently they are now also the go to for scaring away birds, greeting the new day and waking up neighbours.

Discovering that the Vuvuzela is now a domestic tool wasn’t even the weirdest thing that happened that morning, pre-dawn. That honour goes to the nudie fruit drink which exploded on me as I inhaled breakfast in the kitchen. I know these beverages are famed for getting violent when they go off, but my calm was severely harmed when this one went kamikaze and forced me to change clothes before work.

The reason I have a highly repetitive morning, pre-work ritual is so I can do it while still half asleep. The paranoid part of me (and a large part of me is routinely paranoid) is starting to suspect that vuvuzelas and exploding drinks are conspiring against me.


Painefull Out