Thought Picnic: Making days matter

Losing the snooze

Each day appears to be unstructured without the routine that demands the alarm rings in the morning. Not that when the alarm stirs you out of slumber you jump out of bed that the first sound. For some reason or the other, some sociology or psychology when into electronic alarm clock design, it is called the snooze button.

That button you press once to silence the alarm, originally for about 10 minutes, but now, there is a variable duration for which you want the snooze to last before the next alarm strain sting your eardrums into an ambulatory response. Mine is set to 7 minutes, whilst the first alarm time is set irregularly rather than to exactly the quarter points of the clock at 00, 15, 30, or 45 minutes past the hour.

Living free of it

My alarm is musical, never monotonal and I have been conditioned to knowing that the music is an alarm rather than my radio playing back an obscure classical composition of dubious provenance. Yet, in reality, my life is not as regulated by alarm clocks except in uniquely exceptional situations, I would probably be awake before the alarm goes off then wonder if there is enough time for a power nap to the time of the alarm.

When I have abused the snooze button, I would have probably preferred to have a mallet to smash the clock to smithereens, but the said clock is usually my mobile phone, as so, I would hate to be as destructive as sudden inclination might aspire me to.

Do the day well

As to what to do with the day, you need to find purpose and achievement, the direction that brings benefit. From the poem Today, by Thomas Carlyle, which I have known more as a hymn, my spirit demands, “Think wilt thou let it slip useless away.” For each that that comes, there is much to learn, formally and informally, there is a lot to understand better, there is the possibility of the creative that we rarely tap as much as should be done, for the satisfaction is rarely in any tangible reward, so we let it slide.

The mind cannot idle without function and application, we rise to deploy thought, deed, talent and resourcefulness to things that matter, to change things for the better, in person, in event, or in ideas, it could be in all those things at the same time. A day must bring a new kind of fulfilment, whether it can be measured by others is beside the point. You know that by the time the day has become part of the eternity past, you have left a mark, not to regret the one that follows on.

Hotel life: Looking for "Helpless people"

Woken too early for my liking

Considering I am a very light sleeper, I cherish every minute of sleep I get which rarely is longer than a 3 to 4-hour stretch before I am awoken and have to work myself to sleep again.

This morning at my seemingly lovely hotel which is part of a large hotel chain in Cologne, I was woken to an emergency by the fire alarm and after the catechism in German, we were given an English translation.

Evacuation! Evacuation!

“There is an emergency in the hotel, please leave your room and close the door behind you, do not use the lift and follow the directions to the front of the hotel.” Then, it said something about the staff and that I should look for “Helpless people”.

Bags and everything

That would be funny if I was not woken at that hour, but as I was in my pyjamas, it was easy to step into my trainers without even doing my laces and with my key card to hand I grabbed my cane and made down the three flights of stairs.

The number of evacuees that had left their rooms with their belongings were numerous, if we were fleeing a serious emergency, it would have been a looming catastrophe.

As we approached the front of the hotel, the “Helpless people”, which I eventually got to realise were supposed to be the “Helpful people”, the fire warden and staff assigned to handle emergencies beckoned to us to come into the hotel.

The frying pan was saved

He explained in German to the many guests and just told me in English there is no problem. Someone came to my aid and explained in detail that it was a kitchen incident of the chef leaving the pan on the stove for too long which triggered the fire alarm.

Thankfully, no one was hurt including the frying pan, but have I seen how not to do a fire drill or event a real evacuation? Then, please, like I always say in countries where English is not the official language, whilst you all speak English better I can ever speak your language, always get a native English speaker or a teacher of English to review your public announcements. Helpless people, indeed!

Chasing the forty winks away

I’m scared to slumber,
Fading in a moon’s penumbra,
If I care to remember,
The months since December.

For my mind to keep,
And recover by sleep,
All my counting of sheep,
Never got too deep.

In the dawning of Friday,
The clock that made me sway,
Dressed and on my way,
To work to make some pay.

Heavy my eyelids weigh,
Down over my eyes to stay,
Hard to nap as you now may,
For a bed on which to lay.

But for another few hours to go,
What things to keep blood aflow,
My face to have a glow,
Let’s be done it’s time to go.

Out of a tired brain,
A hopper of words like grain,
In order for prose to gain,
A reading free from pain.

The mistiming somnambulist

Unslept

Quite much of an early riser that I am, the clock alarm serves no other purpose than to confirm the arrival and the passage of time. There are very few times when I get woken up by the alarm clock, my body clock seems to have the essential biorhythms for diurnal and nocturnal existence whilst being tuned to abort somnolence at the appropriate time.

Yet, it does not serve much purpose to the insomniac that gets to sleep well past midnight or more happiness slipping into dreamland with the lullabies of Sailing By and the Shipping Forecast.

[]

Overslept

Sleep arrives probably before 02:00AM and I will probably have 2 or more wakeful times by the time it is 06:00AM, BBC Radio 4 keeps my mind ticking away as I roll over trying to get a bit more sleep which altogether may not total more than 4 hours in the night with the 2 hours I have in the early evening.

Then yesterday, my eyes popped open at 7:16AM and my train was leaving the station at 7:17AM, how did I sleep through the alarm? It meant a day of working from home as I cancelled my pickup from the destination station to the office.

Had a health check and the prick of a needle in a number of places before the day was over and I looked forward to the next day. The night fell and I went to bed.

Underslept

The dawn broke with the imprint of the last day; did I miss the alarm again? It was light, the light of an early summer’s day and one glance at my watch and I saw 7:00AM, jumped in my trousers and in 7 minutes I was in a rapid trot to the station.

The streets were eerily quiet for the time of the day and as I got to the station and looked at the clock on the noticeboard, it was 5:13AM. I smiled, got my ticket and sauntered back home for a lie-in.

The memory, the drugs, absent-mindedness or the simple blurring of the sight that gives the mind the wrong information to act on. I looked at my watch at least 4 times before I saw the time on the station clock, all the time, I saw a time 2 hours ahead on a watch with hands until the digital display at the station reset my perspective to see the right time.

Some made fun of me, I chose to ignore them. It was a lovely day.

A fire drill to nil

They’re out we’re in

The day at the office was not supposed to be as eventful as this. My main system at home had a major hiccup such that what I used to be able to do at home now had to be done at the office.

The hours of the mid-afternoon, I looked out from the window of my fifth floor office to see people trooping out of the building as if for a fire drill.

It had me wondering why people from one wing were being ushered out and the rest of us being left to burn, in fact I did surmise to colleagues about their testing the firewalls just to ascertain that they were fire-proof.

Beckoning our charred remains

A few minutes afterwards the alarm did sound at our end of the building and an announcement was made in Dutch for us to vacate the building with the instruction not to use the lift.

I picked up my hat and cane and made for the stairwell walking down at pace in order not to hold anyone up; on the ground floor we were held back by the automated pass-entry system which each of us had to use to step out to the reception where another crowd waited to get out.

Once we were out we were herded like sheep, no instructions, no guidance just taking the cue from those who had gone one before.

After we crossed the road to the other side we noticed a fire engine, a fireman disembarked with a portable fire-extinguisher and entered the building we none the wiser about why we had to leave the building.

No (E)mergency in this Respons

Soon afterwards a Quick Respons Team vehicle arrived, it made me wonder whether the sign-painter was trying Dutch, English or a Dutchified version of Response without the “e” and there was no space for the “e” in case you thought the “e” had fallen off.

The fireman came out of the building a few minutes after and we were ushered back into the building in what might well have been a fire drill but not by any standards brilliant.

Why it failed

The questions I had in mind were many:

Why the alarm had been going on at in one wing of the building without notifying the other parts of the office block.

Why the announcements were only made in Dutch when it is clear that most functionaries in the building work in a bilingual situation with the possibility that a good few did not speak Dutch but at least manage English.

Why the exit gates were monitored when they should have been open especially if the exit process involved panic or a stampede.

And what for?

Why no one bothered to explain what the reason was for evacuating the building – even if it was a fire-drill, it would have been to simulate the process to managing emergancies that could be fires, bombs, leakages or any dangers that would have necessitated conducting the exercise.

In my view, for all the people in high-visibility vests appearing to know what they were doing and probably returning to some debriefing to pat themselves on the back for a job well done; this was a farce at best and I really do not pray I am in this building when something really serious happens because I honestly cannot trust the “Quick Respons Team” to get me out quickly, safely and securely.

Fire drill assessment – Fail.

Dreaming of alarmed cars

When alarms slumber

As vivid dreams go, they could be stranger than fiction and that is how I felt this morning. I had been out partying the night before and set the alarm on the television to wake me up at a time I knew quite well I might not be able to respond to.

A few hours sleep after a night out cannot necessarily give the body the needed rest and recovery to approach the next day with any vigour. A smarter side of I did consider using the alarm on my mobile phone which with its distinct sound would get me up when my mind computes that the sound is for a particular purpose and a response ensues.

I must have settled into rapid eye movement sleep when the alarm went off, I heard it well but it had moved into the setting of my dream.

Memories and innovation

The driver and my mother had gotten out of the car and activated the security system of the car which from what I can recall was an Audi TT – the addition to the context of my dream must have come from John Grisham’s effusive praise of the model in one of his novels I can no more recall*.

The system was quite advanced that we were kept locked up in the car and it started a few manoeuvres to keep us in the car – the self-driving was not erratic though I noticed it had problem with pedestrians that suddenly crossed the road without obeying traffic signals – it swerved rather than hit them, I thought that was cool.

Some idea for reality

So, we tried to call the driver, riffled through all the glove compartments and found that he was a professor in a university and just our luck to find the details and phone numbers of all other member of his faculty listed but his.

Then I thought about why I had not bothered to note the telephone numbers of my father’s friends – well, some idea I need to explore in reality, I am told they all ask after me whenever I speak to my dad.

It stopped with exaggerated prompting

This cacophony of security went on for a while and then we saw the driver run up to meet us and the car return to its original position after the fifth time of rigmarole. I remonstrated with him as he gesticulated to us to stop the car – well, we could not, he had to and he jabbed incessantly at his key fob to stop the alarm and the car’s waywardness or dare I say the security breach anti-flight algorithm.

Then the alarm stopped and my phone rang, all in the dream, I was making some adjustments to allow the driver get in the car so I tossed the phone to him to answer the call, when he handed the phone back, I mustered all the calmness to tell the caller that I had just been messed about by a mad robot of a car due to the built-in security measures.

Triggered by another ring

Just then the bedside phone rang and it was the reception that had been alerted to the fact that my television alarm had been ringing for the past 5 minutes and I had not responded to it.

If that ring had found its way into the dream, I could be sure that the door to my room would have been mowed down to determine if I was about, around and alert-able.

This I believe represents the danger one faces when you sleep with some background sound on, there might be cases where such external stimuli might well get integrated into your dream sequence, I could do with next week’s lottery numbers but in other cases I need to expect my mind to discriminate between dreams and reality, then instruct the appropriate system to respond as required.

* The Summons by John Grisham

Feeling like a Saturday morning

The daily grind

I am amazed at how I do Saturday, here I am, someone who has to be up at 6:21 AM precisely or thereabouts after hitting the snooze button a few times.

In fact, it is not so much a snooze button because I have to deftly select the 5 minutes reminder from a list of reminders on a smart phone – you then ask, if I could do that, maybe I should just get out of bed and get on with it.

I eventually do and I am out of the door somewhere between 6:55 AM and 7:05 AM with the view to catch the 7:22 AM to Arnhem so as to be picked up by taxi at 8:38 AM from the station to my office.

Five days a week, a routine unfolds like clockwork; I sometimes do not need the alarm to wake me up such that if it sounds after I am up and about, I am quite annoyed by the thing. In fact, I also have the alarm set for 1:20 AM on Tuesday morning to watch Ellery Queen [1] on BBC2.

Saturday is lay low

Then Saturday arrives and my body clock turns off, though I am up early, the duvet keeps me confined like in a strait jacket and the comfort of more slumber allows me to laze for another few hours.

I might be inspired to get up and blog if something strange comes up on television, but most of those blogs end up on the scrapheap of the unpublished – inspiration nipped in the bud by the desire to laze even more than engage in some cerebral gymnastics.

No itchy feet for so long

Suddenly, it is noon and the day is fast becoming history like yesterday is gone, I have to get out of bed, make breakfast at 13:00, then wonder about what to do during the day – a bit of shopping and all that, I cannot believe I have spent the last 3 months of weekends in the Netherlands.

I am prepared to stay in the Netherlands until I go off on holiday in just about 10 days, where I might just settle into 18 Saturday days - even then, I need to get out.

By golly, what I really do on Saturdays could make a boring vegetable of me – got to get out somehow and do something different and I probably would when it gets to Sunday.

Source

[1] Ellery Queen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia