Unraveling reveille
It’s been a long day. Mr. Sparky’s day started even earlier. Apparently he woke up around 2:00am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so he finally gave up and got up and finished a paper (Mr. Sparky is working on his masters degree). It was a great use of the time.
Unfortunately, he forgot to turn off his alarm, which was set for 4:10am.
At 4:10am I am awakened out of a dream, confused by the raucous beeping of the alarm clock. I had no idea why it was going off or where Mr. Sparky was. I just wanted the racket to stop. So I groggily started punching random buttons in an attempt to stop the beeping. It wasn’t really working, and in the meanwhile I seemed to be activating all sorts of other noises and settings on the clock because it was beginning to blink, click and whir like a UFO. I grabbed a flashlight and aimed it at the offending noisemaker. That didn’t really help, either. I finally figured out that in order to turn off his alarm clock, you simply press the same buttons that turn off my alarm clock.
Technology confuses me. I mean, seriously…a dual alarm clock that has a radio/CD player in it, complete with five pre-sets, is just asking for trouble. I start wheezing when I have to remember to do anything more than tell time.
Once the alarm was off I was stuck with a clock that had things lit up that weren’t supposed to be lit up. This was due to my panicked pressing of random buttons. In my sleepy but adrenalin-infused state, I only knew of one way to handle this issue: I kept pressing random buttons, hoping that I would hit the magic sequence that would turn off all the lights and notifications. And eventually, it worked. though I have no idea what I did that was successful. In retrospect I should have just unplugged the thing.
Of course, by the time this whole fiasco was over, I was awake. Like, really awake. However, unlike Mr. Sparky I did not get up and do something productive. No, much better to toss and turn for hours, wishing I could fall back into the dream I was in when this whole fiasco began.
‘Cause that’s just how I roll.
