My alarm clock is broken. Not the clock part. That works fine. Not the alarm part, either. That still howls its annoying, penetrating buzz-slash-whine at the exact moment I told it to, several hours ago.
It's the snooze button. My snooze button isn't working. I press it, the alarm stays on.
It's awful.
Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe I should just be able to get up out of bed when the alarm goes off, like the wife in "Babe." Alarm goes off, she's up and running. Her mouth. A real talker, that one. Yikes.
But, alas, I'm not like that. Bed is never so comfy as that moment when the alarm goes off, and at that moment 51-year-old me has a lot in common with 8-year-old me: I just want five more minutes.
Four more minutes? Three?
Twenty-seven, actually. Yeah, I hit my snooze button three times. I actually factor that in to how I set my alarm: I know I'm going to want a few snooze alarms, so I set the initial alarm that much earlier.
I wonder if that's normal. I also wonder: does every snooze button reset the alarm for nine minutes? And if so, why? Who chose the number nine?
Heh. Got that song stuck in your head now, I bet.
But back to the issue at hand. No snooze alarm. Now I'm stuck with a few other options: get out of bed right away; let myself just lie there a bit and risk falling back to sleep; or bringing a backup system to bear, like my phone.
Problem #1: get out of bed right away when the alarm goes off? What am I, a caveman?
Problem #2: if I fall back to sleep, I might be late for work. I may not have the most important job in the world, but there are people depending on me to do it. If I don't show up... well, I dunno. It would at least put my department a couple hours behind for the day.
Problem #3: I don't like bringing my phone to bed. I don't want to hear it ring, as small as that risk is at night, and our plug space in that area is limited. Plus, I hate the way my phone's alarm sounds, and I don't know how to change it.
Get off my lawn.
The obvious solution is: go get another alarm clock, which brings us to Problem #4: Christmas is less than a week away, and we have a rule against buying ourselves things at this time of year.
I once heard a comedian say that the snooze button is the end of civilization as we know it. The snooze button, he said, means: when the alarm goes off, I'm not getting up.
It's kind of true, and kind of not. I mean, even with the snooze button, it's still my alarm getting me out of bed on time.
And anyway, I like to think of this as an example of the adaptability of mankind. We're adaptable. We think we couldn't possibly live without this, or in that kind of place, or if this other thing happened, but I bet we'd all be surprised by what we can get used to.
Point being, we've adapted to the snooze alarm. I've adjusted my alarm-clock habits to include my snooze-button habits, and I'll bet a lot of you readers (snort) have, too.*
But here's the problem with that nice little bit of logic: if I'm really so adaptable, I should be able to adapt to life without a snooze alarm.
But do I want that?
* In fact, I bet every single person who reads this sets the alarm clock earlier than necessary in order to accommodate snooze alarm usage.
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