Beep.
We have this ridiculously complicated alarm clock in our bedroom… it's got two bedside clocks, a bass under the bed (necessary), and it'll keep track of about four hundred different alarm times. If you want to get up every half-hour—and have a different song wake you up each time—you can do that.
I'm trying to think of why we originally got this thing, but I can't remember. I don't even remember if R
had an alarm clock before that. It wouldn't be that surprising if he didn't; he rarely gets to the office before ten and plus, he's old. Whatever… the bottom line is that we got
this stupid thing.
1) It plays a CD, right, and that initially seems like a cool thing for it to do, until you realize that you'll never get to wake up to your carefully selected soothing wakeup music because you're always going to be jolted awake by the loud ass whirring of the CD inside the machine. It's like having one of those little fuckers from
Batteries Not Included wake you up.
2) Guess what CD has been inside the machine for five years? That I'm too lazy to change out? The Eagles. The Eagles Greatest Hits. Every morning after I jump awake to a tiny robot flying next to my ear I get to hear goddamned "Desperado".
3) Both bedside clocks are equipped with snooze buttons. Handily enough, the snooze buttons serve a dual purpose—to "snooze" (hi) and to "turn completely the fuck OFF". So whether you buy yourself ten more minutes of dozing before the tiny robot comes back to drill at your skull or whether you pass out blissfully again until 11:15 depends upon the amount of time you apply pressure to the button. Three-quarters of a second will buy you ten minutes (I think it actually buys you SEVEN minutes. Because TEN minutes might not require you to do all kinds of complicated math to determine what fucking TIME IT IS NOW) while a
full second of applied pressure will turn the machine completely off. Every morning it's a race to the button: me, a person who understands how the machine works and who
has to get up at some point, and R, a person who has no idea why sometimes the alarm snoozes and sometimes doesn't snooze and who doesn't care, frankly, because all he plans to do today is go to the gym and then maybe test drive the new Mustang. So when
he gets there first (often, his arms are longer) I always have to ask, "Did you snooze it? Or turn it off?" And he always answers, "I think I snoozed it." Fucker. No he didn't. Ever.
4) Now, as some sort of coup de grace, it's dying the kind of horrifying death that super complicated home appliances die when they're manufactured by overseas companies that no longer exist. Better, it feels it has to martyr itself by refusing to die
all at once or
during the day. Part of the nightly death production involves the rapid and uncontrollable opening and closing of the CD player lid on top of the machine. And if the CD spinner alone sounds like
one robot, this lid bullshit sounds like
all of the robots are trying to shove the lamp off the table. For years the lid has put on this "fragile" act, objecting if you use anything other than fingertips to touch it, threatening to SNAP OFF every time you dare to open or close it. But now that it's seizuring we're having to think of new things to stack on top of it to try and muscle it closed—last night it bucked off my hot rollers and a small water bottle. Meaning that I woke up
again last night at two a.m. (roughly, who the fuck knows) to the slamming and whirring and blinking and other pathetic mechanical death throes of this ridiculous machine, and then had to get out of bed and stumble through the house tripping over The Jake Who Somehow Sleeps Everywhere All At Once to find my cell phone so that I could use it as an alarm. Surprisingly enough, my cell phone turned out to be in my car, in the driveway. Which was—ha ha!—locked.
5) The backlight on my cell phone screen could be used to signal ships lost at sea; I opened it outside once and NASA called and told me to quit it. I'm afraid if I have to keep squinting at this screen in the middle of the night I'm going to get cancer. Plus the snooze on the phone is every FIVE minutes, which is less like a "snooze" and more like FUCKING
NOTHING.I've been using the "Speedy Way" ring as the alarm ring, and if you have "Speedy Way" on your phone, listen to it right now. Then listen to it thirty-seven times tomorrow morning every five minutes starting at 6:00am. And then don't start crying uncontrollably.
I don't think I had a point, just that we need a new alarm clock. Either that or I'm going to start setting the microwave timer for 4,730 minutes.
