I don’t wake to regular alarm clocks. I never have, even when I was a child. Luckily, the musical alarm on my phone (which is about a foot from my head) wakes me up. As a matter of fact, it wakes me up at 6:00, 6:09, 6:18 and 6:27. If I don’t get up at 6:27, my husband calls me from downstairs and makes me get out of bed.

I’m not really a morning person.

Earlier this week, at approximately 5:20 in the morning, I was rudely jerked out of a sound sleep by some godawful emergency alert-sounding siren. It was beyond fire alarm or impending tornado. It was…

OHMIGOD, OUR NUCLEAR REACTOR IS MELTING DOWN AND YOU NEED TO GTFO OR DIE!

Then the sound stopped and, since we don’t have a nuclear reactor in the house that I know of, I went back to sleep.

Later that evening, I asked my husband what that awful sound was.

Him: “You mean my alarm clock?”

Me: “Why did you turn it up so loud? It’s like you hooked it to some kind of Bose surround sound system.”

Him: “Doesn’t have a volume for the alarm. It’s no different than it’s ever been.”

For. Twenty. Years. I remember the apartment we lived in when I bought that clock, after a power outage made him late for work and we needed one with a battery back-up. We were married, but didn’t yet have the College Kid, so twenty/twenty-one years that alarm clock’s been going off and I had no idea what it sounded like.

Thankfully that 5:20am jolt hasn’t happened again and I’m sleeping peacefully until 6:00/6:09/6:18/6:27 again. How the rest of the world manages to handle waking every morning to an emergency nuclear reactor meltdown drill is beyond me.

I wonder if the battery in that clock’s battery back-up still works…