You Snooze You Lose

After over a decade of faithful service, the snooze button on my alarm clock broke the other night. Note that the rest of the alarm clock is fine. It survived ten years of being bashed three to six times every morning, but it finally decided that it was sick of the abuse. My morning routine, naturally, has suffered. My forty-five minute ritual, designed to gradually ease me out of dreamland, is pretty ridiculous when you think about it. It involves the alarm clock, my cell phone alarm, my wristwatch alarm, and the timer function on my television. It's very helpful to me to have multiple alarms, since when I'm woken up, I'm not sure where the sound is coming from, so I need to quickly snap to my senses to figure out which alarm to shut off. I'm usually able to figure it out without too much trouble. But the wonderful thing about a snooze button, as compared to the off button, is that if you press it and don't get out of bed, it'll be back to bother you in another nine minutes. As things stand now, none of my other instruments of arousal (didn't mean it that way, folks!) fight back after I try to shut the off the first time. I unintentionally squeezed out an extra fifty minutes of sleep this morning with the television blaring, because once it turned on, I got used to it. The snooze button on my clock radio, I guess, is my most formidable rival when it comes time to wake up. If it weren't for that snooze button, I would have slept through untold portions of my life over the last ten years. It's amazing what a little piece of plastic can do.

(Yeah, I just did an entire blog posting on how I wake up.)