Alarm Man

There's always the legend of the Sand Man, you know, the guy that comes and sprinkles sleepy dust in your eyes to make them close? But why isn't there a story about the Alarm Man? You know, the guy that bursts into your room unannounced like a blaring fire alarm because the only way to free your eyes from the the sleepy dust is to terrorize you out of bed? Why hasn't anyone made a story about that guy? I think this is an oversight on the part of purpose driven fairy tale tellers everywhere.

Fairy tales are often told with morals attached to them, like Little Red Riding Hood -- don't stray from the path your mother told you to take, lest a wolf eat both you and your sweet unsuspecting grandma and you'll be stuck in the wolf's belly, like Jonah in the Whale, until some hunter cuts him open and fills him with rocks. (Gotta hand it to the brother's Grimm... I'm not sure I would've come up with the "fill his belly with rocks" part.) Or there's The Three Little Pigs with the moral being build a strong fortress out of your life, lest that wolf escapes the hunter from Little Red Hood's place and picks up a taste for pork chops and you just happen to look like a tender morsel and... what's a house made of straw compared to a blustery day? Really... there needs to be a moral to The Alarm man story, and a wolf (because what's a moral without a wolf), so here we go.

Once upon a time there was girl named Pandora. She had to wake up at 5:00 a.m. every morning to get herself to work on time (don't forget to make a sing songy sound and hold the initial "eh" sound out too long with your voice when you hit the word "every"). So every morning at 5:00 a.m., when Pandora was sound asleep, the Alarm Man would burst in with joy singing BLANG BLANG BLANG BLANG BLANG BLANG BLANG!!! And he wouldn't quit until Pandora rolled out of bed, grumbled to all the way to the coffee pot, and then got in the shower.

One morning Alarm Man came to Pandora's house and found her sleeping with two pillows over head and quite possibly a few glasses of wine lingering in her system and no matter how loudly he BLANGED he just couldn't get through. He BLANGED and BLANGED for an hour straight, and sleepy Pandora just wouldn't wake up. After an hour, Alarm Man left her to sleep because it was time to wake the rest of the world. It wasn't until she opened her eyes at 6:15 with the light of the rising sun that she realized what had happened. "Oh Alarm Man!" she cried, "Why have you forsaken me?" And she jumped in the shower and she ran out the door in record time, in her feeble attempt to get to work on time. But on the road she got stuck behind a wolf (it was really a stupid city bus, but it sure looked like a wolf), and she sat there, frustrated and helpless as the wolf mocked her and said, "I don't eat gluten free, but I do eat those who aren't so timely." (see... it's important, even in spur of the moment fairy tales, to make sure the wolf rhymes.) And Pandora huffed and puffed and squeezed around the stupid Wolf (that was really a bus) as soon as she could and she got into the parking lot at 7:40 instead of 7:30 and she snuck in the back way and sat down at her cube and no one noticed that she had been missing.

The moral of the story? Not really sure. I wrote this so fast and thoughtlessly I didn't really get that far. To be honest, I was watching the clock. What happens when you listen to Alarm Man, but you end up late for work because you're blogging instead of fixing your hair and make-up? Hmmmm...