Electric Sheep

I awoke the morning of October 26th, 2001, with a feeling of unease.  Whether it was the quality of light in my seventh-floor dorm room, or how suspiciously well-rested I felt, something told me that the hour was later than it was supposed to be.

But how could that be?  After all, I'd set an alarm, hadn't I?  I knew what time I needed to get up that morning, and how important it was to be on schedule.  Had I set the time on the alarm and then forgotten to actually turn the alarm on?  It had been known to happen...

I squinted over at the clock, and that one blurry look told me everything I needed to know.  In half an hour, the buses would be leaving for the airport for the flight to Phoenix.  And at this point, it was questionable whether I would be on one.

The adrenaline hit me like a ton of… well, anything weighing a ton and hitting you all at once is basically going to have the same effect, regardless of what it's made of, so there’s really no reason to restrict the metaphor to the stereotypical bricks.

"Well, crap," I said to no one in particular.  My roommate, as usual, was absent.  As far as I could tell, what little time he spent in our double room was while I was in class, because I sure didn't see him any other time of day.  I had considered wondering why he bothered having the room when he was barely using it, but decided rater to simply enjoy the fact that I generally had the room to myself.  

Not that I really needed the solitude; after all, it didn't really matter whether he was there or not while I was watching TV or playing video games, and there certainly wasn't anything else going on to make me thankful for his decided lack of habitation.  Of course, I might have gone to bed earlier the night before if he’d been there, so clearly some part of this was his fault, right?  Right.

I rolled out of bed and dropped to the floor as I frantically considered my options.  I figured it would take me roughly 15 minutes to get across campus from Lander Hall to the Graves Building.  That left me another 15 minutes to get out the door.  What did I have time for?  What did I need to do?

A quick glance around the room eased my mind slightly.  In a fortuitous fit of uncharacteristic responsibility, I'd actually packed the night before.  If I hadn't, I'd be dead in the water.  Instead, I still had a chance.

Keenly aware of my general state of presentableness first thing in the morning, I decided I needed to take a few precious minutes to shower.  It was likely that I'd undo most of the work of the shower on my dash across campus, but at least it wouldn't be layered onto what I felt like now.  And I would have to sit next to people on the bus and the plane.  Simple human decency demanded that I do my best to be at least vaguely hygienic.

Unfortunately, my deliberations had cost me two minutes.  I now had twenty-eight minutes until the buses left.

Grabbing my towel and shower caddy, I flew out of the room and to the showers, which thankfully were right across the hall.  Ten minutes later, I was ready to face the world: clean, correctly-sighted, and smelling significantly better than I had earlier.  I raced back across the hall to my room to get dressed.  Eighteen minutes left.

I cursed under my breath as I dragged out my TOC, black slacks, and black dress shoes.  This was a charter flight; why did we need to get dressed up just for that?  Didn’t Brad realize how hard it would be to run across the campus in this getup?  If he hadn’t considered that possibility, well, then he just didn’t know his band members very well, did he?  It was hardly my fault if he failed to plan for our irresponsibility!

Even leaving the shirt untucked (why bother?  It was bound to come out on the way to the bus anyways, and those were precious seconds!), I was down to my fifteen minute mark as I grabbed my clarinet duffel bag and bolted for the elevator. 

Might the stairs be quicker?  It was a gamble either way.  Seven flights of stairs take a while to cover without serious risk of dying, especially laden with a bag containing my clarinet, changes of clothes, and textbooks and notebooks to study for the test I was going to have to make up the next day.  On the other hand, the timing of the elevators was reliably unreliable, since they got a lot of use by other residents.  In the end, the stairs being in the wrong direction made the decision for me.

As I waited for the elevator, every second stretching out to the inevitable heat death of the universe, I considered the paths before me.  I had two routes available after I left Lander.

The first was a path as straight as possible directly across campus.  This had the advantage of being the shorter path, but it involved crossing multiple streets, several hills and sets of stairs, jogs around inconveniently placed buildings, and paths laden with pedestrians who would not only slow me down, but would also be treated to the spectacle that I would make.

(I once considered trying to formalize a law governing the inverse relationship between the size of a group relative to the pathway it's traversing and the speed of that group.  The speed itself would also be an inverse function of how quickly you needed to get somewhere and how few alternate paths you can take.)

The second was along the Burke-Gilman trail.  This was over a third of a mile longer, and I was going to desperately need every second.  However, there were fewer street crossings, fewer people, and most importantly, no hills or stairs.  It was level the whole way.  Would that be enough to make up for the extra distance?

I continued pondering during the interminable elevator ride downward.  Fortunately for me, both paths started at the same door, which meant I could put the decision off just a bit longer.

I left Lander Hall with twelve minutes remaining until the buses left.

Knowing what kind of shape I was in, my decidedly non-exertion-friendly attire, and the weight of the duffel that would be bouncing around on my shoulder, there was simply no way I was going to be able to run the whole way.  Therefore, I threw caution and discretion to the winds and decided to take the shorter path through campus.

Finally, after everything, luck was on my side.  Stoplights were ever in my favor, and there were no oblivious gaggles of students clogging the pathways I was desperately tearing along.  Unfortunately, being the pre-ubiquitous-cellphone era, and also being antipathetic to watches, I had no idea what time it was.  In my state of heightened alertness, time seemed to fly by every time I had to slow my headlong charge.  With every step, the band mantra of timeliness echoed through my head.

"To be early is to be on time.  To be on time is to be late.  To be late is to be left behind."

Was I late?

At long last, I reached the footbridge across the river of cars known as Montlake Boulevard, and I could see across to the Graves Building parking lot, where a row of buses still idled patiently.  But for how much longer?  It would only take me a minute to reach them, but did I still have that minute?

I bounded across the footbridge, leaped the final steps, and pelted for my designated bus.  My bag slung into the luggage compartment, I ascended the steps of the bus to the jeers and cheers of my section, sweaty, out of breath and disheveled, yet triumphant.

And a whole five minutes early.

---

Alarms clocks and I have an uneasy alliance.

Oddly enough, I'm actually sort of a morning person.  It may take me a few minutes to wake up, but once I do, I'm generally ready to get started on the day.  It's just the waking up that's hard.

In high school, alarms were never a problem, despite the 5:00 wakeup to make my 6:30 zero-period jazz band, and despite many of the late nights I pulled due to practices, homework, or just staying up ridiculously late reading because I was a teenager and couldn't always get to sleep.

It was only once I reached college that things became an issue.  Part of it, of course, was the freedom to go to bed whenever I wanted, and I usually didn't have early enough classes to make a late night a particular issue.  (My ideal first class was at 10:30.)

Band events managed to take the brunt of my oversleeping in college.  In addition to the dramatic escapade above, I can think of times offhand where I nearly slept through a pep band, and, perhaps most dramatically of all, the gameday morning when someone from my section called me right before morning rehearsal and woke me up.  I arrived at the stadium just as rehearsal was ending, and my sole punishment was reassuring Brad that I was okay.  Still not quite sure how I got away with that.

I'm not a snoozer.  I've never really understood the point.  Why subject yourself to your alarm over and over again when you could just set it for the time you'll get up anyways and actually get some decent sleep during that time?  This baffles me, but suum cuique, I guess.

No, my particular trick is being able to turn off my alarm without consciously registering that I'm doing so.  And so when I wake up and realize just what time it is, my first thought is of the betrayal by my alarm clock in failing to go off.

Fortunately for my "continuing to be employed" status, as well as my "not being kicked out of the vanpool" status, it hasn't been a particular issue after college, either.  I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've overslept on a work day with a finger or two left over, and my employer is generally fairly forgiving of one-off later start times, as long as you put your time in.

And yet, every morning, the battle rages to wake myself up when I hear the CD player in the alarm clock start spinning up.  (Hearing that sound in other contexts will actually give me non-negligible amounts of anxiety at this point, due to years of Pavlovian reinforcement.)  Will I remember what I've done by the time my finger finds the "Off" button and my arm falls back to the bed?  Will my sleep-deprived consciousness wrestle its way out of the smothering blanket of sleep?  Will I, in fact, awaken?

Well, if I don't, it's probably the alarm's fault anyways.  Darn things are so unreliable.