A Necessary Evil

See this thing above? It's a portable vibrating alarm clock that we, as deaf/Deaf people rely on to wake us up in the morning. A necessary evil and the bane of my life.  Its named 'The Vibrator'.

Some people are able to just shove it under the pillow and it'll wake them up with a gentle vibration at the right time. Not me though! For some reason whenever I need to get up early to catch a flight, or for an appointment, as soon as I set the alarm clock, my body goes into this weird phase. It's an 'OMG I have to get up early, what say the vibrating doesn't wake me, I better stay awake all night' phase. So I toss and turn, and I might doze for a while, but you can guarantee I'll be wide awake an hour before the alarm is ready to go off. When I don't need it, I'll be dead to the world and nothing will wake me!

I can't shove this contraption under my pillow either in case on that very rare occasion I do go to sleep, my body in a fit of absolute contrariness will roll over to the other side of the bed and I won't feel a thing and slumber on. No, this contraption has to be clipped onto me. Note the shape. It doesn't really have a good shape, and its hard. That means if you turn over, it ends up digging into you and wakes you up anyway.

But last night. It went mad. Totally insane. I don't know what I did to deserve the treatment it gave me last night. I had a flight to catch this morning - and the only flight I could get was one at 7.00am. Which meant I had to be at the airport at 6.30am. So I set the alarm for 6.02am. I double checked that it was 6.02am and not pm. I even double checked the time it was to make sure daylight saving had been accounted for.

For once, I actually went into a deep sleep. I know this because when the vibrator went off I immediately thought - gee that was a good sleep, makes a change! I opened my eyes. Hmmmmm something seems a little off - it's *very* dark for 6.02am. I switched on the light. 3.30am??? WTF??? I woke up enough to set the alarm clock back to 6.02am, clipped it back on to me, turned over and tied to go back to sleep.

{{{{vibrate}}}} ten minutes later. In the dark, I fiddled with the buttons to turn the snooze off and back on again. No matter what I did, the clock then vibrated every ten minutes from 3.00am to 4.30am. The clock would not co-operate, and the snooze could not be turned off. Finally I had had enough. I got up, turned the light on, and reset the alarm again. Just as well I did as the alarm had somehow reset to 7.02am, and the time was way off anyway. I clipped it back onto me, turned over again and tried to go back to sleep.

This time the clock behaved, but my sleep pattern was so disturbed, I then dreamed my cat was missing, that I was going round yelling for her at the top of my voice and somehow ended up at a friend of my cousin Ruth and Terry, who had tooted the horn at me a few times to say hello (so they told me in my dream), and I was yelling for my cat in their garden and she came. I was carrying her home when I woke up at 5.02am, to find the cat right on top of me, exactly like Garfield.

I gave up then, and just lay awake waiting for my alarm to vibrate. It did. At 6.02am. Right on the dot.

I've decided that I will go nowhere before 9.30am from now on!