A fun thing about spite snoozebarring is how you're perfectly justified in doing it. To be clear here, there's a regular old smacking of the snooze to make the noise stop. And then there's the completely rage filled crushing of the button as though it was personally and solely responsible for killing Santa Claus and raping the Easter Bunny.
It's not easy to get to this point. Or at least it shouldn't be. If you're doing the rage crush every morning, it may be time to look into anger management or paxil. Every now and again something goes wrong in the night, something beyond your control. You're up and down and after you get about three minutes of crap sleep the alarm goes off, and when it does it hits you. The alarm personally insults you with its audacity to do its job.
I had a room at the Sheraton while in Detroit last week. It was a pretty standard, decent room. The first of my two nights I stayed up late working and watching some adult swim on comedy central. I had a bunch of crazy dreams and, oddly, popped out of bed at 6:30 fresh as a daisy. After a psychotic day of running from meeting to meeting, I had a good Mexican dinner with Margarita's and enchiladas with a coworker and the collapsed into the hotel room for several more hours of work. At around 2:00 I called it a day, bleary-eyed and crashed into the bed. Because it was so late and I was getting up early I had the presence of mind to set both the room alarm clock and my cell phone alarm clock for the relatively early 6:30 AM. Then sleep fell upon me, dark and heavy.
After what felt like only a few minutes, I woke to a very faint beeping sound. Bleary, I looked at the clock. It showed 4:25. I checked to see if the alarm was going off. The beeping was so faint that tracking the source was damn near impossible. I stood holding the alarm clock to my ear, like I'm in a Run DMC video and it's my boom box, trying to hear if sound is coming from one of the sides. After rotating the box over and over about a dozen times, I decide the beeping must be coming from somewhere else. Then, it stops. I look around, not sure at what and then I collapse back into bed.
About 15 minutes later it happens again. The beeping had been happening for a while, but it had become too obvious and too invasive to my consciousness to sleep through. I stood. I looked at the alarm clock, but decided it's alibi already checked out. I start wandering the room trying to figure the source of the noise. At one point I kicked the baseboard of one of the double beds and swore. Walking around, though, failed to reveal the source of the noise. I formed a cobweb-brained theory that there must be a cell phone somewhere, probably one dropped by the maid. When I couldn't find this phantom phone under the beds, I actually started lifting up box-springs and mattresses to search beneath. Just as I was wrapping this mad mission, the beeping stopped.
I collapsed into bed realizing that I'm a jackass. The noise sounded so faint because it was coming through the wall. Some masochistic bastard one room over had set the alarm for four AM. With the mystery over, I was free to go to sleep. I did hear it one more time, but it failed to bother me after I figured out where it was coming from.
Then, after what seemed like about two more minutes of sleep, the alarm clock did let out a piercing buzz. I have no idea if that alarm clock still works or not because I whaled on that thing until it stopped. How could it make that awful racket after the night I had, of which it played no small part. Where was it's mercy?
There's a time and a place for time spite snoozebarring. I can be terribly satistfying. Give it a try.
No comments:
Post a Comment