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We all have our own ways of staying organized. Some people rely on sticky notes, others keep detailed calendars, and alarms can also be helpful.

But those little reminders can also become background noise when you’re neurospicy. Alarms especially, only work if you’re actually around to hear them.

In this case, a woman found herself having to remind her husband of his alarms that he set up himself to remember various things. That became a lot of work.

After years of playing the role of human reminder service, she finally decided she’d had enough, and her new approach has sparked a disagreement at home.

Read the full story and see what happened below.

AITA for turning off my husband’s alarms?

My husband can be very forgetful. He’s never been officially diagnosed with anything like ADHD but it’s not impossible that he has a condition that might affect his focus.

He’s just never been tested for anything.

For as long as we’ve been together, in order to combat his forgetfulness, he likes to set alarms for himself. He’ll set them on his phone, on the microwave, on Alexa, etc..

This means there’s never a true reminder of what he’s trying to remember because he trusts the alarm itself will remind him of what he’s supposed to do.

He really relies on the alarms… and his wife.

These things can range from jumping on a work call to taking the trash to the curb to taking a beverage out of the freezer and anything in between.

They are rarely high stakes things like picking up our kids from practice or turning the oven off.

The problem is what happens after he sets the alarm.

I’d wager at least half the times he sets an alarm he immediately walks out of hearing distance of that alarm.

Usually he’ll head to the basement, garage, back yard, etc., well out of range to hear it go off. But you know who does hear it? Me!

She is part of his alarm system.

I’ll be in the living room, kitchen, bedroom, etc. when I’ll suddenly hear an alarm going off.

If it’s his phone, he usually leaves it in his office or the rec room. I’ll listen to it chiming for maybe 5 minutes before I get sick of it and go turn it off.

Then I go and find him to remind him his alarm is going off.

This essentially makes me, ipso facto, his alarm.

I have reminded him several times to please set his alarms on his phone and keep his phone with him but he just… doesn’t.

It’s a “forgot to take the pill that helps with memory” kind of situation.

It’s like he needs an alarm to remind him he set an alarm and shouldn’t go a’wanderin until after it goes off!

But then I’d probably have a houseful of alarms going off as he works on his car in the garage.

Recently, I just got fed up and have started just turning off his alarms.

They’ll start chiming and I’ll give them 3-5 minutes of ringing away before I go find them and simply turn them off and go back to my day.

Of course this upsets my husband because now he’s missed the thing he was supposed to remember.

Good for her! But he’s making her feel guilty.

Some examples have been being late to a work meeting, forgetting to call his mother on her birthday, and an exploded seltzer he put in the freezer.

Nothing earthshattering but definitely inconvenient for him. He wants me to go back to just coming to find him since “it’s not a lot of effort” on my part.

I told him it shouldn’t be a lot of effort to just stick to setting alarms on his phone and keeping it on his person if he wants to wander away. He thinks I’m the AH.

AITA?

Yikes. This is what makes people say that when a woman has two kids, she actually has three kids.

What did Reddit think?

A reader shares their thoughts.

It’s his responsibility.

An idea.

Hehehe.

Exactly.

Forgetfulness is incredibly frustrating to live with, especially if it’s tied to an underlying issue, but coping strategies only work when the responsibility stays with the person using them.

Over time, what started as a helpful reminder system quietly shifted into an expectation that someone else would do it for him instead.

Of course she’d grow tired of constantly tracking him down every time an alarm went off.

At the same time, the consequences of missed meetings, forgotten calls, and exploded drinks show that his current system clearly isn’t working.

Soon enough, the alarms will go off, and his wife will also be turned off.