The Alarm: 68 Guns

A corner of Bob’s office.

Yesterday morning I had to catch an early flight that meant I had to get up before 5am. I have a psychological barrier for waking before 5am. 5am is fine but 4:45a sounds horrific.

I set my regular bedside alarm plus I set my cellphone alarm. Then when I got in bed I wondered why I worry so much about missing an alarm.

I don’t think I’ve ever slept through an alarm in my life.

I’ve never missed a plane or been seriously late to school or work because of oversleeping.

I’ve had a couple of incidents where I set the alarm incorrectly or power went off or something like that but I usually wake up myself with enough time to get wherever I have to be.

I suspect my paranoia about oversleeping keeps me from sleeping at all. I don’t think I put together 3 hours of sleep on Sunday night. I made to the airport just fine. (Goodness there are a lot of people running around at 5:30a.)

I spent the rest of the day in meetings trying to stay awake. My method was to be fidgety. I thought there were some voodoo tricks like pinching your earlobes or biting your pinky but those didn’t help. I’m not a caffeine person but at lunch I ordered the smallest possible Coke they would offer me. The server stared at me, then looked at her pad then looked back at me. “You threw me off for a second,” she said.

Because NO ONE in America orders the smallest Coke. I was afraid if I drank too much caffeine I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night and I didn’t want one of those gallon tumblers where most would be thrown away.

The Coke didn’t help much but since I never drink it, it was a delicious treat.

Shut out the light at 8:45p and slept like the dead. Woke up at 5:00 without an alarm.