Satire

How To Wake Up at 4.59 A.M. Every Day

An unconventional and ridiculous guide to becoming an early bird

My life is generally boring. My wife is not much of a drama queen, except for when she goes ballistic over my bad poetry and my daughter generally hides from me in fear of me mansplaining everything. My job usually entails staring at a pile of broken code (as in software code that is not working) for most part of a day and hitting one to two keystroke and then it’ll start working again, keeping my boss happy and me employed. So the highlight of my day is usually when I get the daily digest email from M*d*um.

Recently M*d*um has been pushing this one particular article in my face repeatedly. I think yesterday was the fifth time it appeared in my email in the last two weeks alone. The article is titled “How To Wake Up at 5 A.M. Every Day”, which I have been ignoring it as that’s not a life goal I have and even if it was, then I would have thought all I had to do was set my alarm to 5 A.M. instead of 7 A.M.

It never occurred to me that there might be more to it than just setting an alarm, until I noticed this article is 15 mins long and it has like a gazillion claps and a quadrizillion comments, mostly positive. That piqued my interest and sure enough, waking up at 5 A.M. turns out to be something extremely hard, just like getting curated on MuddyUm. How do I know? I tried it this morning. Set the alarm to 5 A.M. and I was still in bed by 7 A.M.

Now I am on a mission. I am naturally a competitive person, even though I don’t win too many competitions. Last time I won was when I had a staring competition with an unknown four-year-old at the park. He blinked first and ran to his mother crying.

Anyways, I am on a mission now. I want to one-up the guy who wrote the above article. So my mission is to teach the world

How to wake up at 4.59 A.M. every day!

I have to admit, I didn’t quite read the above article. I’m sure it’s full of useful information and tips, and I might read it one day. It is also highly unlikely that I’d wake up at 4.59 A.M. even on a single day, but as I have explained before, you don’t need to know too much about what you give advice on.

So I am going to take the approach Einstein took in coming up with his relativity theories, and do some thought experiments to come up with how to become an early bird- -. (‘- -’ usually means one less, in programming)

How to wake up at 4.59 A.M. every day

Step 1

I believe the basic premise of my natural instinct is still valid. You need an alarm clock going off at 4.59 A.M, and make sure it’s loud.

Step 2

Make sure the alarm clock goes off somewhere in the distance. Empirical evidence is alarm clocks at arm’s length is useless. You don’t even realize it when you turn it off half asleep and go straight back into full sleep. Make sure the loud alarm is far away from the bed so you have to get out of bed to reach it.

Step 3

You might think Steps 1 and 2 are sufficient, but my thought experiment proves otherwise. What’s most likely to happen is you get out of the bed half asleep, walk across to the noisy alarm clock still half asleep, turn it off, and come back to bed half asleep and fall in and go back to full sleep. To prevent this from happening, you need to place “something?” strategically in the path from the bed to the alarm clock, that you are sure to step on-or-in to.

The “something?” is the key in this solution. Its purpose is to make sure your half-sleepness converts into full wakefulness, instead of back to full sleep. Now what that “something?” should be is the question. I can think of a few things, such as a bucket of water or a cat litter box. I think for best effect, the “something?” needs to be changed regularly, so your sub-conscience doesn’t figure out ways to avoid it in your half-sleep.

So, I invite you, readers, to come up with innovative suggestions for “something?”, that could help someone else wake up at 4.59 A.M. every day, while you and I enjoy a good sleep in.

About the author: Kris W Leon is a lazy bum who likes his sleep. He mostly writes satire these days.