I don’t like mornings. Actually, I should clarify. Mornings are fine. It’s getting out of bed that’s the hard part. I’ve never been what you would call an ‘early riser.’ I have always been more of a ‘meander out of bed at around noon-ish’ type of fellow.
Even in the rare cases that I do get an actual decent night’s sleep, I still have serious problems simply getting out of bed. Once I’m up and moving, I’m fine, but the whole ‘actually moving out from under the covers’ is the hard part. Especially when it’s cold. Or hot. Or any temperature, really.
So, I was lying in bed yesterday morning and watching the clock. I know when I absolutely MUST get up, which is far different from when I SHOULD get up. I was playing the ‘five more minutes’ game, which is what happens when I wake up enough to actually look at the clock. Five minutes turns into ten, with turns into twenty, etcetera.
It occurred to me, as I was lying there, that there really should be some sort of device to get people out of bed. Alarm clocks are nice, but they’re simply too easy to thwart. What we need to some sort of . . . oh . . . dart based system. Preferably involving a monkey.
NOTE: The monkey is superfluous, but it seemed like a really good idea at the time. So, yes, there’s a monkey.
My first idea involved a monkey that lived in a little box above your bed. When the alarm went off, it would be prompted to shoot you in the butt with a dart loaded with Red Bull or some similar drink. The dart would wake you up. The Red Bull would keep you up. Simple, yes?
But monkeys are notoriously bad shots and what if you were sleeping on your back? Would the monkey switch targets? Would it wait for your butt to present itself? Would you really trust a monkey with a dart gun and a grudge from being forced to live in a tiny box?
Frankly, the plan seemed a little flawed. So I modified it. What if the monkey simply dropped a bucket of cold water on you? Aim wouldn’t be important and if you secured the bucket correctly, the monkey couldn’t drop it on you. However, there’s always the problem of the monkey drinking the water or peeing in it. In the first case, there would be no water left. In the second case, you really wouldn’t want it poured on you.
That idea was then nixed. What if the monkey lived under your bed and simply yanked the covers off? The monkey would probably be happier and you wouldn’t get a bucket of monkey urine in the face every morning. This seemed like the perfect plan, save that you’d have a monkey yanking your covers off all night when it was grumpy after drinking too much while playing poker.
Yes, monkeys play poker. Typically Five Card Stud (Texas Hold ‘Em hasn’t really caught on with the monkeys).
At about this time, I was forced to get up or be late for work, so I was unable to come up with anymore ideas. Consciousness does that.
However, what if I combined all three into some sort of monkey dart firing, water throwing, cover pulling mechanism? It could work.
Cheers,
-Jason
4 comments:
A monkey is loaded into a crossbow, strapped to your clock. When the alarm goes off, the monkey is fired at high speed toward a bucket full of red bull hanging above your head, which is then dumped on you. This way, you get the dart, which is the monkey, the bucket, and the red bull. Plus, the monkey would probably fall on you then flail around or something.
If your clock was powered by water, you've got all the elements.
Also, what is up with your captchas lately? Mine says "sul'zuda". I'm concerned that if I keep posting comments I'll inadverntantly summon a demon-god houseplant thing.
So you're plan assumes that the flailing monkey will pull off the covers?
My clever plan used to involve an alarm which would only be silenced with a math puzzle or something similar that requires the brain to be fully awake. But I never patented the idea, or developed a working prototype. Because I'm lazy.
And then I read that when you artificially disrupt the sleep cycle instead of waking up when you're good and ready, you'll feel tired all day. So I quit using an alarm clock. So what if I'm late to work? No was depending on me being there on time anyway.
See, I quit work to try to survive as a trader. And one morning I woke up half an hour after the stock market opened, and missed an opportunity that I had planned to take advantage of. So I started to use an alarm clock again. But that didn't work out for my wellbeing, so now I've gone back to getting up when I feel like it. So what if I wake up later than the stock market? Since I quit working, I've mostly been losing money anyway.
Y'know, all I'd need to do is put a helmet on the monkey and that't work. Thanks J. Alexander!
And I don't normally look at the captchas, so I have no idea. That would be cool though!
In the scenario given, something would pull off the covers. Probably me, but there you go :)
That's an interesting thought, Gillsing. I'm a firm believer in waking up when I'm good and ready, but my job demands that I be there by a certain time, so there you go. I guess I just need to be the boss and come in whenever I feel like it :)
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