First, a moment of self-disclosure:  I am not a morning person.  Not even remotely.  Getting me awake under the best of circumstances involves an Act of Congress, a 21-gun salute, and enough coffee to fund a small South American insurrection.  This made college interesting; my freshman year was a near-disaster due to me discovering that “not a morning person” and “Calculus at 8 in the morning” simply do not mix. After that year, I quickly adjusted my schedule to make sure no class started before 10 a.m.  Since then, however, I’ve recognized that, though I may naturally wake up around 9 or so in the morning, the rest of the world doesn’t, and, until I get high enough in my field to work at a place with flextime or that at least allows telecommuting, I better learn to find some way to adjust against this particular weakness.

This journey has led to something of a small war between myself and my subconscious.  At first, I started with something simple - I turned up the volume of my alarm.  My subconscious adapted by learning how to turn off my alarm in my sleep.  I then asked my former roommate, who woke up a little before I did, to wake me up in the morning.  My subconscious adapted first by talking in my sleep, then following it up with grabbing limbs in my sleep, which ultimately led to me starting to hit people in my sleep - this sufficiently discouraged that roommate enough to nix that idea.  Talking to others like me, I picked up another trick - I moved the alarm clock to the other side of the bedroom from my bed.  That was the most successful measure, for, by the time I got out of bed and walked to the alarm clock to turn it off, my mind was usually awake enough for me to stay awake once I killed the alarm.

The key word in that last sentence, of course, was usually, which brings me to where I am today.  At this point, I literally sleepwalk to the alarm, turn it off, then sleepwalk back to bed and go to sleep.  This, needless to say, has done absolutely wonderful things to my work schedule.  Consequently, I need to come up with another countermeasure.  The catch, though, is that the ESO, though also difficult to wake up in the mornings, hasn’t quite reached the level of sheer and utter malevolence between herself and her sleepy subconscious; if I get too creative, I risk turning her into collateral damage.  That would not bode well for my ability to continue sleeping next to her.

Here are my thoughts:

• I could get another baby monitor, place it next to the alarm clock, which would be relocated to the opposite end of the apartment, and put the other side of it in the bedroom.  This would make it necessary for me to walk all the way to the other end of the apartment in order to turn it off.  Of course, this could be countered by my subconscious simply turning off the baby monitor.  Until that point, of course, the ESO would probably be rather miffed that it took the better part of five minutes for me to wander over to the alarm clock.
• I could do what I did during finals week in college - plug in a set of computer speakers into the alarm clock and turn the volume to maximum.  Thus, when the alarm went off, I’d wake up due to about 90 dB of morning talk radio blasting through my ears.  Of course, when I did this in college, my entire dorm floor was ready to kill me, and, in fact, had begun to organize a small posse to find out whose alarm clock was going off - it didn’t help I had a final at 7 in the morning and that it took me about 15 minutes to realize that was my alarm clock going off like a jet engine, so I should probably turn it off.  Yeah… I wasn’t very popular in college.
• Put the alarm clock in the kid’s room.  This would wake the kid up, waking me up, and waking everyone else in the house up.  Of course, this would result in the instant loss of genitalia as soon as the ESO discovered what I did.

So, I’m submitting to all of you - how do you wake up in the morning?  What tricks do you have up your sleeve to make sure that, when that alarm goes off, you get out and start your day?

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