It won't... stop... beeping...

There was a period of time when I was in high school that I slept in the attic. During this time, I also worked at a small convenience store as a cashier, and occasionally I had to work the 6am-11am shift on Saturdays which required that I get up at 5:30. Now, I am not one who rises easily, so this was, to put it mildly, a challenge. I typically set my alarm - which was always set to the horrible screeching buzzer and never to the music that stood no chance of awakening me - for 5:00 so that I could hit snooze several times before being late. Since I usually had no memory at all of the first and sometimes second times I hit snooze, I felt this 30 minute cushion was a necessity.

My brother, who slept in the room at the bottom of the attic stairs, felt differently.

"Mo," he said to me one Friday night. "If your alarm goes off more than once tomorrow morning, I am going to have to kill you." He was very polite about it, but he really felt he had no alternative. So that night I set the alarm for 5:20 with great trepidation, but also with the full intention of getting up as soon as it went off to spare my brother the morning Chinese alarm torture.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

I awoke with a start, leapt to my alarm and started hammering the snooze button. I wasn't going to use the snooze button, at least, not in the way God intended it to be used. I just wanted to silence the alarm until I had enough coordination to turn it off permanently. But the noise didn't stop! I pushed the snooze button. I pushed it again. I tried tapping it really quickly, and then I tried holding it down really hard. Nothing.

I finally remembered that to turn the alarm off, I had to turn the dial to the left two notches. I turned the dial. No change. In desperation, I turned the dial all the way to the left, then all the way to the right. To the left! To the right! Left right left right left! It was still honking! Wait! Unplug the clock! UNPLUG IT!

I unplugged it.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

Frantically, I looked around the room. Ever so slowly, my powers of deductive reasoning were returning to me, and I was able to determine that the noise was not coming from my alarm clock. It was coming from the window. What was in the window? A fan. I ran to the fan. "I have to turn off the fan," I thought to myself. "That will make the noise stop." But the fan wasn't on. No problem! I just turned on the fan. That way, I could turn it off and make the noise stop.

Astoundingly, this did not work.

I considered the situation. Assuming there was some sort of short circuit causing the on/off switch to fail, I decided to unplug the fan. Hey, it didn't work for the alarm clock because the alarm clock wasn't honking. The fan was honking. So I unplugged the fan.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

"It didn't take!" I thought to myself desperately, and plugged the fan back in so I could try it again. I unplugged and replugged the fan a few more times until a tiny shred of reason managed to penetrate my sleep fogged brain. "Wait," I thought, and held still, plug in my hand. "FANS DON'T HONK."

My father found me a few minutes later, with the window fan on the floor and my face and hands pressed tightly against the screen. I had finally deduced that the honking was coming from outside, but I couldn't shake the feeling of responsibility for the noise and I was trying my best to stop it using only the sheer force of my will. Unfortunately, I had made so much noise storming around my room trying to track down the source of the noise that I woke everyone up. My father gently assured me that the neighbors' malfunctioning car horn was not under my purview, and, thusly relieved, I went back to bed.

I did get up with the first alarm, though.

***

And so I have reached November 30, the last day of NaBloPoMo. I did it! Technically! OK, I totally cheated. Remember this entry? And this one? So I'm not going to put an icon on here that says I did it, because I don't feel like I did it. Well, that and because I don't really know how to make changes to my template. Nevertheless, I wrote a lot more often than usual this month, and that's got to count for something.

But, being incredibly lazy, I will probably slide back into my habit of writing when only I feel like it in December. Plus, I'm going to work on a super secret exciting blog development that I hope to reveal by January, and that will eat up some of my computer time. The rest will be taken up by my mindlessly clicking "Refresh" in my Gmail window.

Why don't people email me as often as I click "refresh"? You should all email me more.