We had some friends over one Friday night, a few weeks ago. As we were sitting around, talking, we were suddenly interrupted by the sound of an alarm, coming from the coat closet.
Puzzled, they asked the obvious question: ‘what’s that noise?’
And we proceeded to explain the inexplicable. Trying our best to make a stupid story sound…less so.
Jason bought a watch from Wal-Mart, many years ago. It’s actually the only watch he hasn’t ruined with his weird magnetic arm superpowers. (Yes, for the record, the brand-new Suunto watch number two also bit the dust, about a month after he received it. I doubt we’ll contact Zappos again.)
This watch, which he never wears, has an alarm. Inexplicably, the alarm goes off on a nightly basis, at precisely 9.36pm. Even more bizarrely, we aren’t doing anything about it. We literally sit around listening to the alarm go off at the same time every night, for no apparent reason.
For starters, in order to stop the alarm, we’d have to find the watch. It’s buried in the coat closet somewhere, that much I can tell. But who wants to dig through a coat closet to find a cheap watch? Well, maybe a lot of people would so they could turn the thing off, just not us. Next, we’d have to figure out how to disable the alarm, and given the fact that it goes off at the completely random time of 9.36, I’m guessing that might not be as easy as it sounds.
And really, there’s something comforting about hearing that sound every night, no matter where I find myself in the house. I’ll stop for a minute and think, ‘oh, it’s 9.36′ and really savor that minute. It’s a benign time of day, kids are typically asleep, I’m not. The alarm hurts no one.
But in my clumsy attempt to explain all of this, all I got were blank stares. Understandably so – it is a strange story.
Even stranger that it happened in Indiana as well. Except there, the watch was buried in the top drawer of my desk. Which sat in the living room. And the alarm went off in the middle of the day.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
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