So last night, before drifting off into sleep, I had to endure the laughing and the mocking from my husband on the topic of alarm clocks. You see, alarm clocks and I have a complex relationship. Well, maybe it’s not too complex. They try to wake me up, I try to wrap their mangled corpses around their silent circuitry.
For a long time, no alarm clock could wake me up. So my mom got me one of those old-fashioned wind-up jobs. It made a racket like a fire bell in my ear. Only problem was, being wind-up, it had no power cord to tether it near my bed, and throwing it across the room was a good way of getting the fire bell away from my ear. This started to take a toll on alarm-clock structural stability, as well as my mom’s nerves (as she would often come into my room while I was a-pitchin’.)
So then I got a radio alarm clock, with mixed results. The classical station was right out, as it just turned into dream soundtrack. After the first time Janet Reno appeared in one of my dreams nattering on about Microsoft, I decided NPR wasn’t a good idea, either. I switched to country music, but that was too annoying for the rest of the house, especially at Felicity-waking volume. I settled on annoying pop music.
The next issue was the snooze button. I am perfectly capable of slapping the snooze button ten times without waking up. So I put the clock farther away. I soon discovered that I could do amazing gymnastic feats in order to slap the button and flop back into bed without touching the ground. Finally, I took half of a cassette tape case and taped it down over the snooze button. If I wanted the clock to shut up, I’d have to commit to the switch. The tape case was open on one side. Sleepy fingers are remarkably agile. I moved to cardboard jewelery boxes. My mother walked into my room one morning to find me growling and scratching at the tape around the box and finally ripping it off and subsiding, snoozed, into the covers.
When I went to college, where Mom could no longer override the mechanical minions and shake me awake, I knew I was in trouble. I brought the trusty radio alarm clock, encrusted with scotch tape and scarred with many wounds. I bought a new alarm clock, with batteries (in case of power outage) and put it across the room. Still, my first quarter I woke up one and a half hours into my 8 am Honors Chem Final. Running down the hall in terror, I found my study partner running up the hall in terror, as her alarm systems had likewise failed. I swear to this day, I DON’T remember either going off.
I turned to the dark forces of MS Outlook, and programmed it with increasingly horrifying movie sound clips. Without fail, I would catapult out of my bed during Hudson’s last stand (“Want some of this?” budda-budda-budda alien-shreeeeeek) so as to spare my next-door neighbor the utter horror that is a wall falling on top of Ruby Rod. (The same next-door neighbor, I might add, that regularly failed to spare me her loud monkey-sex.)
With a relationship come complications, though, and one of those is that your husband may not be happy with ear-shattering noises of any form destroying his tranquil rest. So back to the clock radio, and the traditional “loud noise” approach to getting me out of bed, rather than the more effective “guilt” approach. Matt got a very spiffy clock radio, set it himself (after I made us late for class by setting it wrong about three different times), and undertook to wake me up if the clock didn’t. The only problem with this is that sometimes it didn’t wake him up, and Primal Morning Felicity would be faced with the very-spiffy two-setting alarm clock of doom. Primal Felicity did what any good primal person would do, and Matt, unawakened by the crooning of that week’s indie rock sensation, instead opened his eyes to see me on the verge of tears, pounding angrily on the little box that WOULD NOT SHUT UP!
So now the clock lives entirely on his side of the bed, and I’m not allowed to touch it. I don’t know why he mocks and laughs. It’s all perfectly rational.
Comments
And I thought I was bad...
My name is wonko, and I too am an alarm clock hater. I went through similar stages of alarm clockitude. First was the standard electronic “eee! eee! eee!” clock. To this day I hate that one the most. Like many people, I now harbor a deep, primal rage that awakens (ha ha) whenever I hear that noise. Eventually, my subconscious brain began incorporating the noise into my dreams rather than allowing it to wake me up, probably in an attempt to keep me from hurting my hand and breaking things by trying to shut the alarm off.
This necessitated a move to the use of the radio as a wake up tool, but it quickly became obvious that this was a terrible idea. On the few occasions that the radio did actually succeed in waking me up, I was left with terribly annoying pop tunes floating around my head for the rest of the day, which only served to fill me with even more hate.
Then the big guns came out. I bought some really kickass speakers and a subwoofer, plugged them into my computer, jacked up the volume, and wrote a tiny program that would play an MP3 at the time I specified. In order to turn the alarm off, I would have to press a key combination that would be randomly chosen each morning and displayed on the screen, requiring me to be awake and coherent. Unfortunately, there was a flaw in my logic. It quickly became apparent that the money I had spent on those nice new speakers had been wasted when, a few mornings later, rather than figuring out the stupid key combination again, I just threw the speakers at the wall and kicked at the subwoofer until the noise stopped.
Phase 4 in my waking up strategy was to convince my sister to wake me up every morning, since she had to be at school at the same time I did. This worked fairly well for a few days, until I began ignoring her completely and burying myself in the covers and trying to find things to throw at her. She stopped wanting to wake me up after that.
Finally, however, I’m happy to say I’ve reached a happy compromise with the alarm clock gods. My old cell phone has the best alarm clock feature of any kind, ever. The alarm is simple: three quick beeps and a vibration. At first, the beeps are quiet and the vibration is soft. Gradually, the beeps get louder and the vibration gets stronger, until it’s impossible to ignore. I put the phone near my pillow every night, and in the morning, it never fails to wake me up. So far, I’ve never had the urge to throw it at anything, but even if I did, it’s a beefy little phone, so it could probably take it.
It's all true.
Everything she said was true. When we were first dating and I would go stay with her, I often awoke to the sound of pulse rifle fire. I don’t recall it ever getting as bad as Ruby Rod though.
Then there were the occasions freshman year when Felicity would need to get up early to study (rather than the traditional all-nighter, Felicity would study till midnight or so, then get up at 4am, finish studying, and go take her test). At these times, I (not having a test to get up for) wanted to continue sleeping, but Felicity was too considerate for her undeserving neighbor to use the Outlook method at 4am, so she would set a clock radio alarm, and I would wake her up.
At least that was the theory. I would shake her, tell her it was time to get up, and she would say ok. I would then proceed to hold a conversation with her for the better part of a minute, only to realize when she made some completely nonsensical reply that she was still asleep.
Other times, I would tell her to wake up, and she would argue, with some excuse like, “I have to finish the plasmids.” She would persist in her resistance with similar excuses for five or ten minutes. I wish I had recorded some of our converstations.
It became sort of a game. How fast can I get Felicity to make some completely nonsensical remark?
Of course, this became old eventually. At some point, I discovered that threating her with a splash from the bedside water bottle was a fast way to wake her up when she was being difficult. I think I only actually did it once.
I don’t think she did any sleep-arguing after freshman year. Bio and Chem at the U of C really stressed her out. And she hasn’t physically attacked the alarm clock for a while now.
Re: And I thought I was bad...
Threw your expensive speakers…ha ha ha!
Actually, your set-up reminds me of my dad’s at Caltech. They had very thin mattresses on top of a layer of plywood. He made a sensor that would be able to tell if he even sat down again, and affixed a fire bell with a key-pad to the end. The bell would go off, he would enter a code (come to think of it, there may have been some other stuff to do, I think with alligator clips) and the alarm would go off. By this point Dad was presumably awake, and if he got back on the bed, he’d have to do the whole rigmarole again.
Your Sidekick is beefy? It breaks if you take it out in the sunshine, and it’s beefy? In the way that cows die if touched by grass?
Re: It's all true.
Only because it lives on your side of the bed…if you go on a business trip, it’d better mind its p’s and q’s!!!
Re: And I thought I was bad...
Re: It's all true.
Perhaps, if Matt ever goes on a business trip, you could recruit your friends to give you a Buffy-style wakeup. We’d show up outside your window and make vampire noises, prompting you to grab your trusty stake (you do have a trusty stake, right?) and stand guard, lest we gain entrance and start sucking your blood.
That could be fun. I’d even get up early for that.
Re: And I thought I was bad...
Oooh, I see. Does this cel phone perform any purpose save alarm clock?
Re: It's all true.
Dude, you know my trusty stake lives by my door, so that when they are miming the invisible un-invited wall, I can stake them in their exposed innards.
You guys could GET me a trusty stake. I wouldn’t mind!
Re: It's all true.
Plus, you’d have to have unnatural powers to get outside of my window. Either that, or the power to climb very skinny trees, which is natural only in lemurs and the like.
Re: It's all true.
You forget that I have a kitty!
Re: And I thought I was bad...
It’s smaller and more convenient for carrying in a pocket, so if I’m going somewhere where I need a cell phone but don’t want to deal with the bulkiness of my Sidekick, I just toss the SIM card into the Nokia and use it temporarily. But yes, most of the time it’s just my alarm clock.
Re: It's all true.
Umm, yeah. And apart from playing the part of Miss Kitty-Fantastico, her part in the “scary Buffy thing” is what now?
Re: And I thought I was bad...
Ooooh, that’s cool! I forgot about those card things.
Re: It's all true.
She has fangs! Real ones! And she purrs real loud, which could maybe sound like growling if we amplified it a whole lot. Also she could climb a tree with two legs tied behind her back. Oh, and she has lots of experience drawing blood with those sharp, evil claws of hers. I’ve got the scars to prove it.
Re: It's all true.
Yeah. That’ll really wake me up. NOT!
Re: It's all true.
Here’s what’ll wake you up. We’ll figure out some way to insert the kitty in your bedroom while you’re asleep. The kitty will instantly begin bouncing from wall to wall, climbing the drapes, attacking your face, and mewing incessantly. So far, it’s never failed to wake me up.
Re: It's all true.
Yeah! Nothing like opening you eyes to find a ball of fur inches from you nose! Esspecially if it’s a ball of fur with a slimy nose that it likes to rub all over your face.
Re: It's all true.
Just as long as it’s not undead, okay? I don’t want Patches the Zombie Cat in my bedroom. Plus, allergies!