Friday, October 26, 2012

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!



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

LMAO hubby is my alarm clock and if he does go away I just put my phone on vibrate and set the alarm and it works for me under my pillow as the whole bed shakes lol

Anonymous said...

a little story about when I got the vibrating alarm 16yrs ago, I went to the local fire station to find out where the best place was to put it as it was one that included the smoke alarm and had to be on the wall, later that day a fire engine along with 4 fireman arrived at my door to find the best place to put the smoke alarm, lol when they were told it was also a vibrating alarm clock I had to set it to vibrate and each fireman had to hold it to see what it felt like lmao

Anonymous said...

I always thought there were advantages of having a husband that hears :)

Anonymous said...

I'm always amazed at how many firemen it takes to fit a fire alarm :)

Anonymous said...

Brillant alarm clocks, I have one the same and usually have it shoved inside pillowcase so that it doesnt fall on floor, however one day, it didnt go off so kids missed the school bus, so I decided I better get another alarm clock which I have and its excellent, see this link its what I have now, but I still have the other one to use when I go away from home http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3kUL94nmt0