The Automatic Clock

I am not a morning  person.  In fact, that doesn't even begin to explain it.  I'm almost nocturnal, or I would be if people didn't insist on things being done during the day.  

I also have terrible luck with alarm clocks.  There are a million different ways that I've been late because alarm clocks failed to wake me up.  For now we'll just discuss one.

One year my dad got me a really great alarm clock for Christmas.  This magical alarm clock is automatic.  If the power goes out, the alarm clock resets itself when the power comes on.  It has a lot of other little interesting features as well...it knows the day and the date, you can set alarms to go off only on specific days, and it resets itself for Daylight Savings Time.

In theory...

For the first year that I had the magical clock, life was grand.  The clock took care of all my timing needs...but then something went wrong.

The clock began to get confused.  It didn't know what day it was...it didn't know what days I wanted the alarm to go off.  That I could live with.  I just set the alarms to off everyday and made sure to turn them off on the weekends.  That has never been much of  a problem.  The Daylight Savings Time, however has been a problem many times and it always happens pretty much the same way.  

I'm sleeping peacefully until I wake feeling refreshed and ready to go.  My alarm has not gone off.   I roll over and look at the clock.  It reassures me that my alarm has not gone off because I still have (at least) an hour to sleep.  So I fall back to sleep.  Then I wake up again.  Something is not right.  I do not wake up on any day that I have to be somewhere without the use of my alarm and at least five rounds of snooze.  

I usually stare suspiciously at the clock for a few minutes.  This will make it uncomfortable and it will admit to me what's really going on here.  

Ok, so actually it never does admit to me what's going on.  I usually have to spend a few minutes waking up and thinking about it before I realize that something has definitely gone wrong.  I usually go in search of my phone or computer to check that my clock is not lying to me and that I have just magically woken up when I needed to.  It's usually my phone that gives me the bad news.

The sheer shock of seeing the time displayed on the clock gets me out of bed immediately...but you can be sure that any day that starts that way is downhill from there.  

This morning was one of those mornings.  Apparently the automatic clock decided that Daylight Saving's Time would start two weeks early this time around...oh...and this time it would start on Tuesday.  

Happy Hump Day!