I’m a rare breed. I consider myself a morning person, but I have a really hard time waking up in the morning. Maybe I’m not a morning person after all.
I had a weird oddity when I was growing up, and I think it lasted even through high school. No alarm, no matter how loud, could wake me up for school. If, however, my dad opened my bedroom door to say “Wake up,” the sound of the door opening got me awake immediately.
I don’t really know what happened in college, as I mostly slept in (also managed, for most of my four years, to schedule my classes to be late and not on Fridays). After college, I tried having two alarms—one to get me out of deep sleep, and one to finally get me up. This strategy worked most of the time, but sometimes I’d turn off even the second alarm and then end up sleeping in too late (and miss whatever appointment I had or be late for my job). So I finally moved to my current system of having an extremely loud alarm… in the next room, so I have to physically get out of bed and walk over to the next room to turn it off. The idea is that by the time I’d woken up my muscles enough to turn off the alarm, I wouldn’t be tempted to go back to bed. Of course, I am still tempted—the temptation is just not as strong, especially with the cat meowing to get his breakfast (bless his heart).
My wife, I have to say, is the queen of the art of snoozing. I don’t know how she does it. She has one alarm and will sometimes hit snooze four or five times in the morning and still somehow manage to get up. There are even days when she hits snooze so many times that she doesn’t have to turn the alarm off completely, and the alarm will go off again in the evening (this is one of those old-timey clocks that doesn’t have AM and PM on it).
Maybe some day I’ll be as good as her. Then again, she somehow manages to get those start-at-9-but-really-you-can-stroll-in-at-9:30-and-that’s-okay jobs, while I somehow end up at those start-at-8-but-really-you’re-supposed-to-be-here-before-8 jobs. The art of the snooze eludes me. Maybe when I’m retired I’ll give it a shot.