You can’t always get what you want. But sometimes you can.

I knew it would come back to bite me in the arse. Smugness never pays. It started at Christmas, when, at twelve weeks of age my darling girl gave me the best present I could have hoped for – she started sleeping through the night. And not this bullshit ‘five hours is considered through the night’ in baby-technical terms, but actual whole nights, 11 hour stints of peaceful,  blissful undisturbed slumber. Finally, I rejoiced foolishly (and yes, a little smugly), we’re over that hurdle, through the worst of it, praise be to the end of living in a slightly dazed state of deprivation because my child sleeps! And then she didn’t.  And she still doesn’t.

We’ve been experiencing the joy of what’s commonly known as ‘four month sleep regression’, or in our household ‘are you fucking shitting me child? Please, please, go to sleep and stay a-fucking-sleep’.  If I sound like I’m losing my humour about it, it’s because I am. Either the term itself is a misnomer or our kid didn’t get the memo because at five months that shit is still going on and no one is laughing about it. The problem is that when babies learn new skills their busy little brains are working non-stop to try and process that information, which for us means one small person who is practicing her newfound rolling and crawling skills. All. Night. Long. On one hand I have to admire her dedication, but kid, do it in your own time please!

It’s important to know one’s shortcomings and I will freely admit that the hours between 12 and 4 am are not when I am at my best.  I don’t have the same capacity to be an empathetic and tolerant mother, or human being in general, at that time. So when my little one wakes in the night do I go in there with a beatific expression of concern for my poor restless child? Do I fuck! I traipse in half asleep with a face like thunder uttering obscenities under my breath – and sometimes over it.

The thing that makes the mornings after these nights a little more manageable is coffee.

I gave up caffeine a few years back, but since a coffee machine came to live at our house a couple of months ago I’ve been wholeheartedly embracing that little morning bolt of perk-me-up. Until the morning last week when the bloody miserable machine let me down. No lights, no sound, no power and certainly no coffee. This shocking revelation, combined with a particularly wakeful night prior, culminated in the perfect storm for a fairly terse early morning phone call to Nespresso. It’s here that I’d like to offer a public apology to the unfortunate customer service person I spoke to; it’s not your fault you have a shit job dealing with shitty people whose shitty machine won’t work when they really need to it, I shouldn’t have told you to try harder, that may have been unfair. Sorry.

But I’m not sorry about what I did next, which was simply what any savvy unsatisfied consumer would do with the tools and technology on hand – I engaged the awesome power of social media with this post on their Facebook page:

Dear Nespresso, I am a coffee lover and mother to a 5 month old baby, as such I don’t get enough sleep and caffeine makes me a better mother and much nicer person. My husband very wisely bought me a Nespresso for my birthday 6 weeks ago and since then I have been better and nicer on a daily basis – until today when the machine ceased operation. No coffee this morning makes me much less nice and the fact that it will take two weeks to be repaired makes me much less happy – two weeks in the life of a sleep deprived mother is like dog years. I’m not sure that even a personal visit from George Clooney and Matt Damon to console me together would fix things right this moment. Of course if you could arrange that it would be worth a try, otherwise I’d really appreciate it if you could work your magic and restore my crucial daily caffeine fix pronto so I can go back to being a better person. Thanks, Katie.

And what do you know, that very same day I had this response:

 Hi Katie. Thanks for your post. Whilst we can’t arrange for a visit from George and Matt, we can help restore your daily fix of caffeine. In addition to our warranty we do offer the use of a Loan Coffee Machine for the duration of the repairs. If this is something you would like us to arrange please send us a Private Message with your contact Phone Number. We are sure this will make you a little happier. Thanks

Then, hey presto, by end of the day I had a loan coffee machine making its merry way to save me.

So the lessons here are:

1. If you want me to be nice to you, your chances are best during civilised people’s hours.
2. If you want me to be even nicer, bring me coffee.
3. And one that I learned from my wakeful little girl’s conduct of late – if you grizzle long enough and loud enough some poor bastard will pull finger and give you what you want just to get a bit of peace. Mature? No. Effective? Yes!