Mike Dougherty's Blog

When the alarm clock fails …

We are a two-alarm-clock household.

My wife gets up about 5 a.m. and gets ready to be at work between 6:30 and 7. I go in later, so I have a later wake-up time. Right now, we’re sharing a car, so I sometimes take her to the office and then return home for a quick nap.

Nancy’s clock-radio with a buzzer quit early in the week. So she trusted me to set the alarm with my battery-powered LCD travel clock until she could go buy a new one.

I performed my new job well for a couple of days, but she still reminded me often before she went to bed. (She usually makes it until the sixth or seventh inning of St. Louis Cardinals games, but I watch the entire game and then the post-game interviews before I consider going to bed.)

But Thursday morning (or Wednesday night) was different. When I got to bed, she was awake enough to remember to remind me to set the alarm. I still was awake enough to reach over and do it — or so I thought.

Nancy raised up in bed quickly and said: “Did you set the alarm?” I looked at the clock and thought I saw “1:32,” and I said, “Yeah, I think so.”

“Are you sure?”

I looked again and this time the clock said “7:32.” When I looked at the on-off alarm switch, it was neatly there on the right under “OFF.”

Nancy quickly called in to work and explained that her alarm clock had died and that she had just gotten up. Then I remembered that I was supposed to be in the office for an 8:30 a.m. training seminar over the Internet. The techie-types like to call such sessions Webinars, but it seems like a pretty hokey, too-cutesy word to me.

Still, I was due to be in the conference room in less than an hour.

Nancy took a quick shower and I took a quicker one. We dressed rapidly and jumped into the car. As we started up Kanis Road, my wife kindly offered to drop me off and keep the car. We rushed down 12th Street and waited until we reached Woodrow Street to get on Interstate 630 to head downtown. (I still prefer Wilbur Mills Freeway, which is what it was called when it was built.)

She pulled up next to the Stephens Media office at Second and Main in Little Rock about 8:10 a.m. I even had time to grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen before the training started. It worked out well because several of my fellow Webinar-ists were caught in creeping traffic as they closed in toward downtown or tried to cross the Main Street Bridge from North Little Rock.

Still, the day turned out to be a struggle. We even had trouble getting a computer hookup from St. Louis to work. Eventually, it did and a second session in the afternoon went smoothly, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that when the alarm clock fails early on a given morning, you seem to be swimming against the current the rest of the day.