Third time's a charm

Have you ever seen the movie Signs? Besides having two extremely terrifying scenes in it, it also featured the adorable Abigail Breslin, prior to her Little Miss Sunshine fame. In Signs, her character is always drinking water and leaving half-filled glasses all over the house. I, too, have been drinking water and habitually leaving glasses of water all over the place, making me think of the movie every time I go around picking up after myself.

In her case, the water she leaves everywhere saves the world when it turns out to be the downfall of the invading aliens. When the water is thrown on them, it burns through their flesh and kills them. In my case, my water didn't end up killing aliens or saving the world. It ended up burning through and killing my alarm clock.

I woke up one morning, for whatever reason, very flustered. I turned to hit snooze and knocked over my glass of water, which dumped right into the top of our alarm clock. I unplugged it immediately and turned it over, hoping to salvage it. After drying upside down for a few hours, it was clear the alarm clock was a loss. It would turn on and keep time, but wouldn't let me set the alarm, possibly the most important feature of the whole device.

I went to Target to pick up a new alarm clock. I bought a cool one that let you change the colors of the numbers and even turn off the light for total darkness. The catch: It only let you snooze three times. Well, after a few days of Alan cussing at the alarm clock for not going off continually, I took it back and traded it in for a new model. Ah! The frustration! On attempt two, I bought a battery-operated alarm clock. And not just battery as a backup, but battery ONLY. Needless to say, that was not going to work for us. So after a third trip to Target, I have now purchased a corded, repeating snooze, non-waterlogged alarm clock. It even has two alarms, so that I can set one for myself and one for Alan. Turns out that the third time was a charm with the alarm.

But as I was taking back version one, I got to wondering. Although it was clear that we needed more than three snoozes, should we really need that many? Isn't that a little much? Are we a little lazy? Are we the only people in the world that have a history of sleeping through three snoozes and not even realizing it? So, to satisfy my curiosity, I thought I'd take a poll of your snooze practices to get a feel for what's going on out there in the general sleep world. Just click your answer and click Vote. You can also go to View Results to see what everyone is saying...and to see if you're a weirdo too, although you probably already know that you are.

How many times do you hit snooze?

• None. I'm up and at 'em with the first alarm.
• Once or twice. I like that extra snooze time.
• On occasion, more than twice. Sometimes I just can't get out of bed.
• Regularly more than twice. I'm lazy and/or don't have to be anywhere at a certain time.

Created on October 11, 2007

View Results

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