I didn’t intend it as a suggestion to piss him off, but to wake him up. Alarms and flashing lights don’t work; we’ve established this. I was suggested something that might help.
Of course, since he isn’t your son, you may want to get his consent beforehand.
I have to call him Basement Dan because my uncle’s name is Dan and it thoroughly confuses my dad when I refer to him as just “Dan.” As if I’d be talking about my Uncle Dan making a godawful mess in my kitchen at 2 AM or something. Whatever.
The time to bring this up is at 10:30pm on a work night.*
(I’m just assuming that Basement Dan stays up till 1:00am because he “only needs ~5 hours,” because that’d be true to type. If he’s sleeping eight hours and still sleeps through his alarm, I’m afraid you’ll just have to murder him in his sleep.)
When I was in the dorms in college, the alarm of the guy two doors down would wake me up. Not him, though. He’d sleep on through it, hour after hour. It was an incredibly aloud alarm, too.
Did I mention he was a Dairy Science major, and got up at 3am to get out to the barns and start taking care of the cows? No? Well, he did. I’d go down the hall, open his door and kick his bed to wake him up otherwise I’d never get back to sleep. Why couldn’t he have worked at Taco Bell like my other mates?
A gun? Jim is too kind. First, I’d hang a flaming gasoline-soaked tire around Morning’s neck. Then, I’d take a baseball bat and go after Morning’s kneecaps until they were smashed to bloody pulps. Then I’d do something really cruel…
Spoons
A Basement Dan Type and Definitely Not a Morning Person
When I was a freshman in a high rise college dorm, I was awoken each morning at six a.m. by the loud beeping of an alarm coming from an unknown source. While this was annoying on the weekdays, it was intolerable on the weekends. One Saturday, after months of covering my head with a pillow and futilely attempting to ignore it, I decided to seek out the sound.
In my pajamas, I walked down the stairs a floor at a time, searching each floor for the noise. Two floors below me, in the boy’s dorm, I found the source. I thought the alarm was loud in my room, but here, two floors below me, it was deafening. It was like a fire alarm going off. I knocked on the door it was emitting from, but there was no response. I got the Residential Adviser on duty. Damn, that girl knew how to knock! She slammed her fist into the door several times. Soon, a pasty slug-like being appeared. He blearily turned off the alarm at her request.
Now: why I hate college students. The guys who lived in the same dorm as the alarm owner were wandering back and forth from the bathroom at this time. Clearly, they were awakened by the noise. It was impossible not to be, unless you were the owner, I guess. But in all those months, NOT ONE of them had ever complained or attempted to solve the issue with this guy. They were so passive or so fearful of rocking the boat with a dormmate that they were willing to tolerate being woken at 6 a.m. every day for months. I complained once, and the problem was solved.
The is the story of Basement Dan
A bald headed loser
With no piss pot bedpan
Big bad Dan
He sets his alarm for half past six
by lays in his bed
And dreams of chicks
Big bad Dan
My dog wakes me up
With her wet nose
Two full hours before
My alarm goes
Beep.
Beep, beep, beep.
Then I get up and trudge downstairs
Let the bitch out
And pull out hairs
Big bad Dan
The basement door opened
I turn on the light
Hold my nose
Walk down a flight
Big bad Dan
I take an ax
Hack him to bits
I’m tired of his
Stupid human tricks
Big bad Dan
He’ll feed the dog
For near three weeks
All my neighbors
Are pervs and freaks
They won’t miss him
He won’t pay rent
But I know what I’ll
Give up for lent
I’ve never understood this thing about the snooze button. Why not just set the alarm for the time you need to get up at and sleep peacefully until then?
I agree with the icewater trick. When I was in the army and was on watch late at night, I had to wake up my replacement. He wasn’t keen on getting up, so after ten minutes (of my sack time, btw) I took a bucket of snow and dumped it on him and down his sleeping bag. When he still looked groggy, I fired him out the tent door into the -20C weather. I threw his clothes out after him. The dopey fuck was still alive in the morning, so I assume he woke up enough to dress himself. Not that I cared as I was asleep as soon as I crawled into my sleeping bag.
I never understand that either. I’m not a morning person and I don’t sleep well*, and the idea of a snooze button is torture to me. It’s hard enough for me to fall asleep/stay asleep; I can’t imagine purposely waking up and hitting the snooze to sleep more. I just set my alarm to the latest possible time I can. Once that sucker goes off, I’m up.
I have trouble staying asleep. An average night will have me wake up 3-5 times during the night. It’s not terribly uncommon, though, for me to really only get about 2-3 hours of sleep because I will wake up every 10-15 minutes (and I know that because I have my giant clock next to my bed).
I’m sure Jim would agree with any and all suggestions for torturing mornings.
The suggestion for Basement Dan to get to bed earlier probably wouldn’t work, either. Night owls don’t even get sleepy until the wee hours, regardless of when they get up. It’s somewhat of a societal crime how everyone has to bend themselves out of shape to fit one particular type of biorhythm (but still not an excuse for subjecting everyone around you to your alarm).
Basement Dan’s sleep schedule is not quite that easy.
For a while when he was unemployed, he was on some sort of schedule that included not sleeping for days and then falling asleep sitting up in a chair in my living room. Or, going to bed at 7 am and sleeping until 4:30 pm. This would make me extremely unhappy because his job when unemployed is to look for work and you cannot look for work at 4:30 pm. He’d get all sorts of calls from jobs he’d applied for online and would take 3 days to call them back because he was asleep during business hours.
His excuse was that he was hoping to get an afternoon or midnight shift job, so he wanted to switch up his sleep schedule. Talk about putting the cart before the horse!
The job he’s at now is the job he’s been at since 2001. He got laid off from there in July but is now back working 4-5 days a week for them.
So, he’s been working for a place that requires him to come in at 8 every morning for uh…8 years now. No amount of ice water or serious talks about bedtime are going to change Basement Dan. This is not how he operates.
As a guy who formerly shared a dorm with other guys, allow me to offer an alternative explanation:
The other guys knew, because they had turned on the alarm to get back at the dormmate. (For whatever reasons.)
We’d’ve never tolerated stupid crap like that from dormmates, no matter how clueless they were. But we’d’ve tolerated almost anything for revenge’s sake.
