I'm Only Sleeping
Here is what was supposed to be Friday?s post. I still like it, so here ya go.
I love sleeping, but I hate to go to sleep. Isn?t that a terrible conundrum? It seems to plague young people of all ages, when they ironically are the ones who need sleep the most.
Ever since I?ve been employed I?ve had a problem with being late. 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there, it plagues me. You see, I?m a guesstimator. If I can get to work in 24 minutes, I?ll leave 24 minutes until the hour. Regardless of of the fact I could hit traffic, get behind a slow driver, etc, the fact remains that I know under optimal conditions how long it takes and so that is the amount I plan on.
My poor alarm clock has been blamed probably more than it should. Many mornings than I care to share will happen like this: Alarm clock goes off, Evan smacks the Alarm Off button, Evan goes back to sleep. Evan wakes up 5 minutes after time to be at work, half-awake and desperate. He then runs out of the house as quickly as possible, trying to formulate thought (read: excuse) as he steps out of the door.
I?ve had the same alarm clock for, oh, almost a decade now and it is just as terrible and worn down as you can imagine. A poor piece of electronics that can tell time and make the appropriate noises when its set to go off, but those noises are just not doing the trick any longer. And haven?t for years, to be honest.
I?ve warned my wife before that I?ll get a louder, more forceful alarm clock, after which time she warns me that she can give me a louder, more forceful smack upside the head if it turns out like she suspects: I?ll sleep through it (I sleep like the dead) and she?ll have to turn it off or scream at me to. This is not a healthy early morning situation. This is just shy of madness, where madness is defined by an Angry Spouse. Nobody wants that. Not even my single friends. They know better by now.
A quick Goog? gives me this page which looks interesting enough. My god, those clocks have an attachment which shakes your bed. That is just about as hardcore as one can get without hiring someone to stand over them with a cold glass of water, eagerly threatening you to rise.
It?s not that I don?t feel guilty about being late, because I certainly do, and I?ve tried various tactics to ease the hurt of my lateness. Working late, buying breakfast for chagrined coworkers, nothing really works. From as far back as I can recall I?ve worked on it, but ?working on it? has amounted to little more than being late then being so scared to oversleep I?m on time the rest of the week. Then the following week the cycle repeats.
Some cycles are good, some wear away the goodwill and patience your coworkers have for you. I hereby pledge my need to stop this terrible habit, and as soon as cash returns to my bank account (however fleetingly it does so), I?ll do my best to get the Earthshaker 2000 to rock me like a hurricane in the early morning hours.
But now somewhere out there is a guy with a cold pitcher of water, completely jobless.
And all those haunted unlucky guys get told
Who?s really wanted and who just can?t stay sold
2 Comments:
Oh man, I used to be the worst at oversleeping! As a teenager, I would oversleep almost every day, somedays missing the bus (we lived way out in the country) and would need my mom to take me to school.
My problem was that I would simply sleep through the alarm clock without waking up. She tried getting me louder ones, but all it did was wake her up (at the other end of the house)... It eventually got so stressful for me to oversleep (my mom can make a lot of stress) that I started waking up out of fear of oversleeping. For the first several years of our marriage, I annoyed the crap out of Lana because I would explode out of bed the second that the alarm clock went off.
Then there was the sleep-paralysis-thing that I also eventually got over. Talk about spooky! But it's not relevant here.
In college, I had this roommate that made me insanely jealous in that he could set his radio-clock to a whisper-volume and still wake up to it (I still need something loud). That is, when he didn't wake up 10 seconds before his clock was set to go off and turn it off ahead of time.
The older I've gotten, the easier it is for me to wake up early. On workdays, it is not unusual for me to get up at 5:00 (I imagine that I just heard you groan).
I keep my alarm clock in the living room. A walk across the house ensures that I am, more or less, awake.
Can't help you on the sleeping through it problem. One of the joys of being a sysadmin is that I normally get to work a lot later than bedpartners.
Dan
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