The Curse again (by alaric)

Eargh.

I've been laid low with something flu-like the past two days, but that's not the problem at hand; it just adds a little extra horridness to it all.

Somebody wanted some information from Sarah before school time today, and since it was late last night when Sarah had the information, we decided to ring at eight in the morning to pass it on rather than eleven thirty at night, since they might already be sleeping.

So I set the alarm for eight, and had my phone to hand (with the number in). And went to sleep. I was woken by the alarm, turned it off, then found to my annoyance that the clock said eight twenty - I'd slept through twenty minutes of alarm, mainly thanks to only having gotten to sleep around one o'clock and being ill, so I poked Sarah awake, handed her the phone, and she left an answerphone message - at the time, I though this meant the whole family had probably already left and we were too late. Afterwards, we drifted back into our troubled sleeps.

I then naturally awoke at half past nine (since I work from home, my normal routine is to wake up at nine, to start work at ten).

So, imagine my surprise when I found I had a voicemail message from this person, rather annoyed that we'd woken them up by ringing at twenty past five that morning...

I still don't know how this happened. I distinctly remember turning the alarm off, and seeing it was twenty past eight before waking Sarah to make the phone call.

This suggests three possibilities:

1. My alarm clock played a mean and nasty trick on me. It shifted three hours ahead in the night, then shifted three hours back before I woke again. (Yes, the alarm was set for eight, not five; I'd not slipped up in setting the alarm or anything simple like that, and the alarm clock's time does currently match what my watch, wall clock, and NTP-synched computers say). Which is actually possible, since it does synchronise to the MSF time signal; perhaps it received a corrupted time signal, but then reset itself when it received a non-corrupted one later.
2. I dreampt of the alarm clock going off and me stopping it, and woke naturally from this, then saw the ...:20 on the clock face and thought it was 8:20 because that's what I was expecting (and 8 and 5 look similar on a seven-segment display)
3. The Painswick telephone exchange is using Time loop logic as part of an experimental new generation of infinite-bandwidth broadband connection.

I suspect (1) is the most likely. But either way, it's incredibly depressing.

3 Comments

• 

  By andyjpb, Wed 6th Dec 2006 @ 10:20 am

  Was it light outside when you did the ringing? What does the call record in your phone say? I wouldn't worry about the other people tho'; if they don't want to receive calls, for example during the night, then they have the option of switching their phone off.

  Interesting predicament...

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  By Charlee, Wed 6th Dec 2006 @ 1:21 pm

  I'm going with option 2. I did a great one once with an analogue clock where I read it in mirror, panicked, and got up 6 hrs before I needed to 🙁

• 

  By Phil Griffin, Thu 14th Dec 2006 @ 4:26 am

  Evil alarm clock is my guess. I'd watch it closely.

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