At 4:45 this morning, I woke up, stumbled into the bathroom, and had the usual early-morning hope that I was actually awake and in the bathroom, and therefore wouldn’t be dreaming frustrated bathroom dreams for the next half-hour. I stumbled out again, fell into bed, and was deliciously floating off to sleep when a sound met my ear. Click-click. Ah, the thermostat. No problem there. I re-cozied my head against my pillow. Click-click. Why in the dickens is it clicking twice anyway, let alone in such quick succession? Click-click. Click-click..

“Matt, whyza thermostat clicking onanoff, onanoff?”

“I dunno, sometimes it does that. It’ll fix isself, go back to sleep.”

I snuggled into my pillow and fixed the mental image of the thermostat with a look of nonchalance. Click-click, it remarked. Click-click. Was it my imagination, or was it getting louder?CLICK-CLICK. CLICK-CLICK. The delay was shrinking. CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK! it wildly trilled. I stared at the ceiling in disbelief as it continued its drum roll. With a final, triumphant CLICK-CLICK it subsided. I smiled and closed my eyes. Click-click. I groaned quietly. I counted to ten click-clicks and swung out of bed.

It perched innocently on the wall. CLICK-CLICK. It was very loud at this proximity, and the lights flashed. I jabbed the warmer button, but it did nothing conclusive. CLICK-CLICK. I sighed and blinked drowsily.

“Tap it!” Matt called from bed. He did not have to urge me a second time to use force against the vile automaton. I tapped it on every available surface, CLICK-CLICK, graduated up to cuffing, CLICK-CLICK, and was considering whether punching would be out of the question when Matt appeared. He did quite a bit of wise-looking fiddling with it. CLICK-CLICK. He looked so wise, in fact, that I went quietly back to bed and shut the door.

I heard his footsteps go downstairs, the furnace turn on. No clicks. I sighed happily. The furnace went off, and his feet re-ascended. Click-click. Click-click. After some time, he came back to bed, confessing he wasn’t sure what was wrong, but he’d stopped it. I drifted, finally, back to sleep, sometime around 5:30.

At 6:51, I rolled out of bed and faced the fact that the time was simply not there for creeping onto a heating vent and going back to sleep. Click-click. What? Click-click. Grrrrr. I stumped into the shower and drowned the sound. While I showered, the thermostat clicked silently on the other side of the wall. I jumped at a thump and a rattle against the wall, deduced Matthew had risen from sleep, and went about my business. Emerging from the humid bathroom some little time later, I saw the black bracket, electrical pins and sundries clinging to the wall where the thermostat had been. The clicking had stopped.