The Insane Person's Guide to Telling Time

*Note: This is an old post I wrote a while ago and it takes place in the time before Remus and I were shacking up.*

I never really considered myself much of a morning person, but compared to Remus, I am the morningest of morning people to ever get up in the morning.

He can be showered, dressed, and out the door in 15 minutes (an unfairness that only other women will understand), and can actually walk from his apartment to his office in less than 10 minutes. So, if you're halfway decent at math, you'll see that this morning routine clocks in at just under half an hour, so to be at work by 9:30, he would need to be out of bed by 9:00, which isn't really that early of an hour. However, running late in the morning is a continuous problem.

In an effort to curb this issue, Remus purposely mis-sets his bedroom clock so that it runs 13 minutes fast. So when his clock says "9:00," it's actually 8:47. "3:45" is actually 3:32. "10:10" is actually 9:57. You get the picture.

This tactic would possibly work to help get an unmotivated morning person up and running at a reasonable time...if someone else has mis-set the clock and you are none the wiser. Because, you see, when you mis-set your own clock, you know what you did, and unless you have the short-term memory of a goldfish, you'll remember that you did it, and you'll continue to readjust the time in your head, therefore never having those extra 13 minutes you're trying to grant yourself.

I would now like to present a reenactment of every workday morning at Remus' place.

[Begin scene]

Clock says 8:45, alarm goes off. Remus slaps the "snooze" button and goes back to sleep.

Clock says 8:55, alarm goes off. Remus slaps the "snooze" button and goes back to sleep.

Clock says 9:05, alarm goes off. Remus slaps the "snooze" button and goes back to sleep.

Wolfie: Baby, you should get up. It's after 9:00.

Remus: (grumbling) It's actually only 8:52. I have time.

Clock says 9:15, alarm goes off. Remus slaps the "snooze" button and goes back to sleep.

Wolfie: You're gonna be late...

Remus: It's 9:02; I have plenty of time.

Clock says 9:25, alarm goes off. Remus shuts off the alarm and stumbles toward the shower.

Remus: Shit, I'm gonna be late!

[End scene]

I suppose the supportive thing for me to do would be to mis-set the clock an even further 13 minutes and not tell him, thus actually giving him those extra 13 minutes in the morning. But it would probably only work once, and then when he saw the actual time on his cell phone, he'd just start subtracting 26 minutes from the bedroom clock, Rain Man-style, and I've entered us into a never-ending spiral of faux time-setting that will eventually lead to:

[Begin scene]

Clock says 9:05, alarm goes off. Remus slaps the "snooze" button and goes back to sleep.

Wolfie: Ungh...guh...wuh...wha time issit?

Remus: (grumbling) It's actually only 4:53. I have time.

[End scene]