Early morning my phone started to ping like a thing possessed.

Usually I have all my notification sounds turned off. Everything for work – off. Everything for social media – off. Most of the time, I get to my messages when I pick up the phone and see them sitting in there. My daily life is a constant “round the grounds” of different platforms to check what I have missed.

The first app I checked was WhatsApp. I had deleted this a couple of years ago and only recently was forced back into it (not through my own insistance) by the Womens Golf Network. The ladies send each other messages about tee times and playing groups. If I’m not in the group, I’m effectively isolated so begrudgingly I joined and I must have forgotten to set the notifications off which resulted in notifications pinging in mostly during the day while I was working, and they were organising the next day’s golf game. ?

However this morning was different.

I couldn’t find where they were coming from. Notifications annoy the hell out of me, so I went into different applications and the settings of the phone to see what had magically changed but I couldn’t find anything – work notifications remained silent.

In fact, I had zero messages or emails with work anyway. Not many people at work ping me for stuff anyway (usually it’s the other way around ?) so there are days when I don’t know what’s going on because my Teams channels are all quiet and unbolded (meaning there’s no activity going on in them) so I can only assume everyone is head down, working hard at their desks at home OR there’s some kind of work “party” online that they’re at and I’ve not been invited to. ?

I wondered if it was tweets from my network but again, I dont have these turned on for any social media. It did get me wondering if there was any way of hiding my Twitter profile without deleting it but alas no.

Much later I find out that it was my husband’s phone! He’s a gamer and has set notifications when a certain game retailer sends out messages on games and consoles and they were live tweeting at some gaming conference. The phone was constantly buzzing but neither of us were even bothered to get up from a warm bed to stop it. Instead groaning to each other and cursing phones, Twitter, social media, and everything under the sun.

Argh the curse of the bloody phone. ?