Andrew Underwood

Bargaining for sleep

0530 radio alarm goes off
Continue sleeping
0545 buzzer alarm goes off
I need to be gone by 0640 [T- 55m]
Macro necessities
-Food (Usually cereal) [8 -– 10m]
-Bathroom (Wash face, brush teeth) [10m]
-Dress [5m]

Micro necessities
-Pack a lunch (1st priority) [8 -– 10m]
-Read the Internet [arbitrary]

I stare at the alarm clock after turning it off and try to think what time it should be reset to so I can get a few extra minutes of sleep. It’’s easy to waste vast quantities of valuable morning minutes surfing the Internet, reading email, checking blogs, checking website stats, reading news. It comes down to the time between 0545 and 0600 being used for sleep or Internet surfing, or both. Often I still feel really tired so I reset an alarm to 0600 which gives me just enough time to do the things I need to do, everything except the Internet. If I’’m extremely tired I’’ll sometimes hit the snooze on the 0600 alarm propelling me into the red zone at 0610. This means that I won’t have time to make a proper lunch. This doesn’’t happen too often, but if it does I try to make a couple of sandwiches that I can have at break and then go buy food at lunch break.

One morning I didn’t have time to make anything for lunch, plus I couldn’’t find my wallet so that meant that I wouldn’’t be able to buy anything either. With no time to make anything I hastily grabbed a loaf of bread, better to have that than nothing. One guy at work always brings the raw materials for a sandwich and makes them right then and there at work. Coincidentally he forgot his bread that day so we traded. My bread for his sandwich fillings of salami, cheese and mustard. It turned out my wallet was actually in my car wedged between the console and the drivers seat. So I would have found it if I was really hungry and searching my car for loose change in desperation.