The Alarm Clock

Alarm clocks are evil. Fact. I dare you to find someone who enjoys his or her alarm clock. I'm not talking about setting an alarm on your phone to play the smooth sounds of Enya to rouse you in the morning. (Though I did used to have my stereo set to play Pirates of the Caribbean music to wake me in the mornings, which made me leap enthusiastically out of bed with the determination to pirate and pillage the world.)  I'm talking about hardcore, old-school, ear-shattering alarm clocks. The kind that send you into minor cardiac arrest. Every single time. Do people even use those anymore? I do. It's unfortunate. Neither my alarm clock nor I benefit from our relationship. My alarm clock has been hurled against the wall so many times I'm amazed it still works. (Actually it stopped working once and for old times' sake I hurled it against the wall, then it magically started working again. Yeay.) And my heart has been racing so many times because of that infernal beeping that I have become slightly neurotic. And jumpy.

What does my alarm clock sound like? Terrible. It sounds terrible. Think of the worst sound you can possibly fathom. In Hell. Now times it by ten and smother it in celery. There is only one alarm clock that sounds worse: my little brother's. His is truly old-school. It's a gold-colored wind-up clock with a ringing bell alarm. The kind you see in Little House on the Prairie and think to yourself, "Man, I'm so glad I didn't have to live back then." Luckily for my brother, he never could hear his alarm clock. He slept like a tranquilized bear. I, however, having created a life for myself of neurotic jumpiness, could hear his alarm clock go off from clear across the house. Complete with minor cardiac arrest. My parents knew my brother slept like a rock (he often slept through the smoke detector false-alarming, so we're lucky he is still with us), and they knew I was instantly aroused from sleep by the slightest noise, so since they very intentionally gave that alarm clock to my brother, I'm pretty sure they hated me.

Now I have kids, and they have become my alarm clock. The other morning my 4-month-old baby started shrieking which caused the cardiac arrest which made me hurl her against the wall. No I didn't. But I did cry a little. I was so terrified.

When I am king of the world, there will be no more alarm clocks. People will just sleep as long as they like. If they insist on having some way of being woken up, too bad. The world tried that alarm clock thing for far too long. Do you know when the alarm clock became a mainstream household item? The same year World War I started. That cannot be coincidence.