Monday, January 22, 2007

Return of the Killer Alarm Clock

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to this week’s (belated) Monday edition! As it usually goes with Mondays, I had grand ambitions to get the week off to a wonderful start. I set an alarm to wake me up nice and early-ish (8 am) yesterday, and I planned to start applying for jobs as soon as I could turn the computer on. Well… it didn’t happen that way at all. In fact, pretty much everything I had planned for was disrupted in one way or another, for better or worse.

To illustrate:

The Plan: To wake up nice and early-ish (8 am)


What Actually Happened: I was woken up at the ungodly hour of 6 am by the worst thing of all: the upstairs neighbours’ alarm clock. This isn’t the first time this has happened here in Victoria, and it’s also a phenomenon that, for whatever reason, has dogged Marty and I in our last three apartments! It’s never just a couple of beeps, either. Oh no. We have been plagued with neighbours who use perma-beep alarm clocks but never wake up to turn them off. They just go on and on and on… I’m usually awake by the third or fourth ring, and then I lie awake and listen to the beeps for hours. Literally. Are we the only people in the world who know proper alarm clock etiquette? Surely, dear readers, you can pass Alarm Clock Etiquette 101 with flying colors. A quick quiz will help confirm this:


1. Does your alarm clock wake up:

a. You

b. Your neighbours

2. When your alarm clock rings, are you:

a. Home to turn it off

b. Somewhere else entirely?

3. Does your alarm clock:

a. Ring for a maximum of one minute before shutting itself off

b. Ring until somebody manually turns it off, even if that means it rings for a whole morning

Hmm… seems pretty simple to me, but apparently many people find the act of turning off an alarm clock too difficult to handle. But I digress…


The Plan: To start applying for jobs as soon as I turned the computer on


What Actually Happened: Nothing of the sort. Instead, we cleaned our apartment, I knit a couple of toques, and I wove in the last ends of the end-ridden top secret blanket I’ve been knitting. Marty has always wanted a flat-top toque, and I finally found a pattern that would make it happen.






The Third Eye Chullo pattern comes from the Knit Wit book
, and I used Patons Classic Wool for the grey one and Lang Tosca for the striped one. (Forgive the random hat-on-a-lamp shots... Marty went to work today before I remembered to take some pictures!) Maybe the third eye can wield off any unwanted alarm clock advances in the future… or better yet, land me a job!

4 comments:

Robin said...

Lovely toques! The third eye is cool. I sometimes have a similar problem with my upstairs neighbour, who I think leaves his alarm clock on the floor...the wood floor...lending to a nice clear resonance of the annoying buzzer.

carmelclose said...

OMG, my eldest son's (who moved back home to go to College) alarm clock goes off at 5:30 in the MORNING even when he's not at home to shut the &*%^$ thing off. This morning I unplugged it, felt kind of good LOL!

Anonymous said...

I have

a) had the roommate with the "I'm a truck backing up outside" alarm. It sometimes took a while to realize that something that obnoxious could be coming from my own abode. I wanted to drown it in the kiddie pool.

b) been the person who constantly forgets to turn off her alarm while going away and experiences deep and resounding guilt upon return home

c) had another roommate (same bedroom) who thinks that 20 snoozes is an appropriate amount. Obscene!

Anonymous said...

Well my new upstairs neighbor, for 5 months, his alarm clock would go off 4am - 7am (3 hours) every day, 7 days a week.

I filed a complaint with the noise complaint department, but they turned out to be useless, so I had a word with my neighbor about his alarm clock, and he stopped using it for 1 month, then went back to doing the same thing all over again.

His alarm clock seriously affected my mental state, and sleep pattern, and I finally snapped. I went up there and threatened him with violence. The ringing alarm clock problem is no solved.