iPhone wakeup call without disturbing my SO?

October 12, 2010 7:20 PM

My job in IT means being on call overnight. Pages come from SMS messages and the occasional phone calls. The problem: they wake up my partner. Help me find a way to wake up when I'm paged without waking her up too!

My phone is an iPhone, so cable-y and bluetooth-y things work. I've tried: sleeping with earbuds in (they fall out and I'll miss a page); an old bluetooth headset that clips on my ear (really uncomfortable for hours, and it falls off); putting the phone beside the bed (we both wake up); putting the phone on loud out in the hall (she wakes up, I don't); putting the phone on my side of the bed, or in my pillow, on vibrate (the whole bed hums).

I sleep on my side, usually my right side but occasionally my left. Still, if something attached securely to my left ear I could probably get by sleeping on only my right the nights I'm on-call. Besides it's not my sleep I'm trying to improve!

I saw these headband headphones but I'm a warm sleeper to begin with. A friend of mine who needs music to get to sleep recommended these clip-on bone-conduction doohickies but before I spend $75+ I'd like to see if there's something else I'm missing.

Any great ideas? Surely I'm not the first person to try to solve this problem.

posted by mendel to technology (16 answers total)

Sleep in something with pockets and put the iPhone in your pocket on vibrate?
posted by COD at 7:24 PM on October 12, 2010

When I had a baby sleeping in a cosleeper next to me that I was loath to awaken, I used to wear a vibrating pager watch. The buzz stayed on me and did not vibrate the whole bed. I can't find the model I used to wear, but it is similar to this one, which looks like it will pick up your phone signal and turn it into a vibration on your wrist.
posted by apparently at 7:37 PM on October 12, 2010

That Horrible Year when I was in your shoes, getting paged 6-10 times a night one week out of a month, I ended up having to sleep somewhere else.

Yeah it's easy to feel sorry for yourself when you have exiled yourself to the hide-a-bed and that bar is digging into the small of your back, just because of your job requirements. But think of it this way: the next day, you will be super crabby. However, your partner - having gotten a decent night's sleep - will be on an even keel.

Until I started sleeping on the couch on On Call Nights, we were both exhausted and crabby. BAD COMBO.
posted by ErikaB at 7:44 PM on October 12, 2010 [6 favorites]

How about having her wear good earplugs while you rely on an audible (non-vibrating) alert?

If she runs the risk of missing her normal morning alarm because of it, make THAT alarm the vibratey one.
posted by Madamina at 8:34 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

COD: "Sleep in something with pockets and put the iPhone in your pocket on vibrate?"

Perhaps an armband?
posted by I am the Walrus at 8:39 PM on October 12, 2010

I fill the role of the PBOC* every few weeks too, and while our pager traffic is usually pretty quiet (yay for 24/5 manned support), my wife was PBOC every 3 weeks for a year or two, and her solution was to stick the pager under her pillow. I never knew when it went off on the other side of our king sized bed until the following morning, but she would get alerts and go deal with the problem. On the other hand, the nagios config made it such that anything bad would send out at least a half dozen pages at once, which would be a lot harder to miss than a singleton here and there.

* Poor Bastard On Call
posted by Kyol at 9:05 PM on October 12, 2010

(And I'll note that I think I'm a lighter sleeper than my wife - but YMMV.)
posted by Kyol at 9:10 PM on October 12, 2010

I used to set it on vibrate and put it under my pillow. Easy for me to turn it off quickly and muffled enough to only wake the wife once a month or so.
posted by furtive at 10:18 PM on October 12, 2010

When I was doing that, I just slept in the guest room, like ErikaB. What I wouldn't have predicted, is that we both kind of liked it that way. I don't have to do on-call duty any more, but we still each have our own bedrooms. Makes sharing more fun, like a date. Plus, we can both get up whenever, read a book, listen to music, work on the laptop, or whatever without having to worry about disturbing the other.

Just take the pager in with you for snuggling time, take it back to your room with you when you go to bed. If you accidentally fall asleep, the worst that will happen is it wakes you both up.

I have friends who think I'm crazy and would hate sleeping without their partner, but after all this time being used to having my own room, I wouldn't want to go back to the "normal" way.
posted by ctmf at 10:22 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

I second sleep in another room when you're on call.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:45 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Personally I have mine on vibrate on the floor by my side of the bed. After 2-3 weeks we both got conditioned to it, me to wake up, wife to sleep through it.
posted by lundman at 10:51 PM on October 12, 2010

Phone on vibrate tucked into waistband works well for a silent alarm for me. Plus having it there, while a little uncomfortable, keeps me in mind even as I sleep that there's something out of the usual, and I awaken easier.
posted by dancestoblue at 10:53 PM on October 12, 2010

How about a Bluetooth Bracelet? Note that some don't vibrate for texts, only calls, but that one appears to support texts as well.
posted by closetpacifist at 11:12 PM on October 12, 2010

Strap a vibro phone to your ankle with Velcro.
posted by flabdablet at 12:16 AM on October 13, 2010 [2 favorites]

Would the sound of the vibration wake you up? Would it wake up your partner? My solution has been to keep my phone on vibrate on my nightstand. That way it doesn't make the bed vibrate, but it's close to my ear, and it's never disturbed my boyfriend.
posted by spinto at 11:05 AM on October 13, 2010

Get her some earplugs. hopefully she's understanding of the fact that this is a job requirement and it's really not your fault she wakes up that easily.

That's how the wife and I handle it now. When my fire department pager goes off in the middle of the night, it's not just an SMS tone. If she thinks the iPhone SMS alert is noisy, try this on for size:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x8EzQi2TCI

Maybe some sort of white noise device on her side of the bed would help out a bit? We have one of the Logitech Squeezebox Radios and we leave some nature sounds playing all night. They help the wife fall back asleep after the aforementioned noisy pager goes off.
posted by drstein at 1:08 PM on October 13, 2010