This is Your Wake Up Call

    I'm not sure where my writing inspiration has been lately, but it's left the building.

    Anywho -

    I was thinking about something the other day that has now been bothering me ever since. There's things that have not existed forever, I know. I'm sure my little cousins can't IMAGINE the world without iphones or ipads or ipods or iwhatevers but I lived through that time where those things didn't exist.

    However, I've always had an alarm clock in my life.

    I don't know exactly when the alarm clock was invented. I tried to look it up on Wikipedia but there was a whole lotta reading - going back to Plato's days. I saw some things about water alarms (I don't know either) and clock towers. (Did the clock towers wake up the entire town? I don't know either.) But seriously, what did people do before alarm clocks? I picture all these people in an old timey town - girls with their awesome big dresses and men with their weird baseball-like pants and navy jackets - prancing around their non-paved street and tiny little wooden homes town and waking up whenever the heck they want.

    Did they just begin their day whenever they woke up? My sister suggested that maybe they had someone who would go around and wake everyone up. But then, how would that guy wake up? I asked my twitter followers and someone said a rooster. I guess in your little wooden home you could definitely hear a rooster. Cock a doodle doo.

    Then I started thinking - how did they know what time it is during the day? Yeah sundials and all. But how would you describe that?
    "Hey, what time is it, John Smith?"
    "Shadow's at the 2/16 of the dial, Paul Revere."

     It's much easier to say 2:00. If that's what 2/16 of the shadow or whatever is. At least they had no TVs in those days so they didn't have to worry about what time their show was on. Plus, I'd imagine having your clock outside is pretty inconvenient. As inconvenient as the word "inconvenient." I can never ever spell that right.

     If anyone really knows what people did before alarm clocks, I'd like to know because what if you couldn't afford a rooster? Or lived in a city? Did big cities exist in those days? Was it normal to have a rooster in big cities in those days? Who knows?