An Alarming Situation

From San Francisco / New York

There are two alarms which wake me up in the morning, both of them unreliable in their own unique ways. The first is a cheap plastic one I picked up in Peru when my previous one crapped out. I travelled for a year without a watch, but the number of bleary-eyed 4am rises made an alarm clock a necessity. The alarm on the Peruvian clock is accurate to the minute, give or take 20, which means I have to make sure to set it especially early, then curse it when it goes off and deprives me of those last precious minutes of sleep. It's all the more dangerous for not having a snooze button — several times I've woken up an hour late with no recollection of the earlier 15 seconds of semi-consciousness it took to turn the alarm off.

The second alarm is on my phone. It's much fancier than the standard beeping function that comes on other phones. Somewhere between 9:30 and 10:30 I get a wake-up call, usually in the form of a Spanish-speaking lady asking for a Señor Cristobal. It's never the same woman who calls twice, although the call is always from Florida, leading me to believe there is a personal assistant service based there with an unusually high turnover rate.

This level of personalised attention is rare in the modern world, and though impressive, some days I receive 3 calls while on others I don't receive any, making the utility of the service questionable at best. In fact, the reliability seems to be worsening. Two days ago my phone alarm went off at 9:30 in the evening, and I picked up to find someone calling from Chile who took quite a bit of persuading before she accepted that I was not, and did not know anyone by the name of, Eduardo.

The unintended side effect of all this is that when an unknown number calls my phone, I pick up expecting to hear Spanish. It's funny how your mind makes nonsense of English words if it's expecting to hear another language, and responding in Spanish asking the caller to repeat because I didn't understand has resulted in more than a few confused conversations.

At this point I've decided that the Spanish alarm service isn't much use, but waking up is coincidentally when I am least able to speak coherently in another language, so I have yet to be able to unsubscribe. Finding a way around this catch-22 is my current challenge, and I'm hesitant to bring a 3rd alarm clock into the mix.