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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.
Change seems to upset many of us. The reason is not always clear, but we often don’t care for venturing outside our comfort zone — and I’m, not talking about the city of Benton’s goofy advertising slogan from a couple of years ago, “Welcome to Your Comfort Zone.”
Just by paying attention to our reactions as we go through a typical day, we can realize how addicted we are to our routine.
If I don’t make a traffic light that I normally breeze through, it throws off my drive to work. If I get to the city parking garage where I normally deposit my vehicle for the day and I encounter more cars than normal for, say, a Monday, it irritates me. My thoughts run something like: “Oh, gosh, I’m going to have to park five spots up from where I normally do.”
I’d like to say I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.
You probably have your own examples.
Maybe it has to do with knowing that you had two granola bars left over from last week, but you get to work and there’s only one left or they’re gone entirely. It’s not a matter of you minding if your buddy in the next cubicle needed something to eat while he was up here over the weekend or even that the janitor forgot to pack a lunch, so they “borrowed” something from your desk drawer. If asked, you would have gladly offered the bars to either.
But because you expected one thing and your reality was another, it throws your day off kilter.
For some, it might be a matter of getting older or “set in your ways,” as they say, but I’m not sure it’s that so much as it is laziness (and I include myself). Maybe we need to just get out more and experience new things. Then we don’t get so unhinged when we experience a little change in our lives.
Be careful if you have to go to downtown Little Rock or North Little Rock on Saturday morning — it’s the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure and tens of thousands of people will be there to run, walk or cheer on breast cancer survivors and their supporters.
It’s the largest event of its kind in Arkansas. If you don’t need to go downtown early Saturday, avoid being in the area until 9:30 or 10 a.m. It’ll help with the traffic.
But after that, the Foodie Festival in downtown NLR is a great place to be.
Mike Dougherty's Blog 