Elise forgot her keys in her office and didn’t realize until she got off the train home from work at midnight. She called her husband to come pick her up for an hour, but he had turned his ringer off before bed. When she finally got home she woke him up to have a fight, but he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. Is Elise right that he should always be able to answer his phone when she calls, or is he justified in turning his ringer off before bed?
Ayla Brown: Good morning, Elise. How are you? You must be tired today.
Elise: Hey, I am. Thanks for acknowledging that.
Ayla Brown: Well, I just read an email saying that you work a really awkward shift. And by the way, welcome to the club. So do Jim and I. We wake up really early. But you take a train to and from work.
Elise: Yeah, I do. I’m a nurse. I take the purple line, and it’s easier than driving. I do have weird shifts, and the one I wrote in about is. It’s an 11 p.m. train that leaves and it gets me back to my stop at 12:06 a.m..
Ayla Brown: Where do you live?
Elise: Franklin.
Ayla Brown: Okay, wow. So you take the last train at night and it’s the purple line. That is a long journey after a long day at work, too. You must be tired.
Elise: Yes, And I’m totally out of it. And I just kind of, like, decompress on the ride home. So I took the last train home, and it’s super late. And I realized when I get in that I left my keys, my car keys in my locker back at the hospital.
Ayla Brown: Yeah.
Elise: Like I said, it’s the final train. Yeah. I realize this is the situation, but there’s, again, there’s nothing I can do. So I, I called my husband and he just didn’t answer. He didn’t pick up. I guess he’s asleep. Okay. Again, it’s after midnight. And so I called again. I called again. I called him 19 times. I have no one else to call. It’s in the middle of the night.
Ayla Brown: Right, right, right.
Elise: 19 times did not wake him up.
Ayla Brown: Dang, that man must sleep heavy.
Elise: Yeah. I guess. And so I make another plan. I get an Uber, and I’m just too old for this, Uber to go home. I go right to him and yeah, he’s sleeping. Which I guess is better then. What have been worse if he’d been awake or been asleep, but he’s asleep. I wake him up and I went off on him a little bit because I felt like, what if something had been really wrong? I could not get a hold of him. No, there was nothing I could do with that. Its 2023 and I could not get a hold of my husband. Wow.
Ayla Brown: Yeah. I mean, what did he say? Like you called him 19 times. Was his ringer not on? I don’t understand how he didn’t hear that.
Elise: No, that’s right. He put it on silent like he was in his routine and it was on silent. And you know, he works, too. And he was kind of mad at me because he’s exhausted. He says you have your schedule and I have mine.
Ayla Brown: Like, what if I was dying in a ditch and something really bad was happening to me and I needed it? Was it a real emergency? And he wasn’t picking up.
Elise: That’s how I felt. Anything could happen to me. Or our family, our kids. I was so mad and exhausted and I probably went a little bit crazy on him. But that’s the reason I want to know, don’t you think husbands should always have their ringers on and always have it on high?
