Once when I lived in Chicago I was walking to a meeting on North Michigan Avenue – about 20-minutes from my office. I was admiring the multitude of window displays along the way, making dozens of funny comments, oh, they were funny.

However, like all the other noises in my head, I was the only one who heard them. What does all this have to do with the subject of this diatribe? Not much but it’s a pleasant memory.

Once I began a heavy, weekly travel schedule I found a competitive calling; I decided that I would never let a hotel alarm clock get the best of me by being so complex I’m not able to figure out how to set a wake-up call.

At first it was just a necessary sport, I always arrive early at the hotel where our event is at because I generally treat myself to an afternoon nap because I have to get up so early sometimes to catch a 9:a.m. flight – most often to the West Coast. I’d always practice setting the alarm so I wouldn’t oversleep and miss the cocktail reception and dinner. Once I didn’t check to make sure I was dealing with 6: P.M. instead of 6 A.M. and missed the entire evening’s festivities.

Only through the good graces of an astute member of our host’s public relations staff, who noticed I wasn’t on the bus going to dinner and called my room to see if I was alright was I saved. Bless that woman.

Just like Scarlett O’Hara and her damned potato, I held up the alarm clock and vowed, “As God is my witness; I’ll never oversleep again!”  I’ve probably stayed in the better part of 1,000 hotels – meaning I’ve had over 1,000 occasions to oversleep if I didn’t set the alarm properly. This is not as easy as one might think.

Just like there are hundreds of recipes for meat loaf, there are just as many different alarm clocks. Some are so intuitive you can figure it out in seconds. However, some of them assume you have a graduate degree in mechanical and electrical engineering. That’s when I dig in my heels and attack that son-of-a-bitch clock that’s trying to get the best of me!

I remember once reading an interview with Hall of Fame relief pitcher Goose Gossage. He was fearsome enough as a large man with a heavy Fu Manchu mustache and goatee. But in his mind was where the real meanness lurked – his avowed hatred for batters who tried to get the best of him. He would angrily stare the 60’6” distance to his victim and think, “You’re mine, Prick!”

I feel the exact same way when I encounter a new alarm clock. NO DAMNED ALARM CLOCK WILL DEFEAT ME!!!!!! I can’t remember what hotel it was but only once in the past 10 years have I encountered a clock that I gave up trying to program and called the front desk for a wake-up call. As low as I felt from my first (and to date, only) defeat at least I felt that I had a Plan B. One thing went wrong, however…Plan B forgot to mark down my request for a wake-up call and it was only because Nature called that I realized my wake-up call was supposed to have come an hour before. Now, I don’t give a damn if I have to call the help desk at M.I.T….I will set that F-word alarm if it’s the last thing I do on this side of the soil.

Now I wouldn’t have to show such dedication if my back up system worked — hotel wake-up calls. In the late-‘60s when I first started traveling as a young man, I called the front desk for a wake-up call every night before I’d dream of sleeping with Emma Peel from The Avengers. Once I woke up on my own – two hours after my plane for Boston had already left.  I stormed down to the front desk and started raising hell about not receiving my wake-up call. It would have been easier to find someone to admit kidnapping the Lindbergh baby than it was to find someone with testicular-honesty to admit they blew it.

I don’t want to mention the name of this place because it happened so many decades ago it’s now a moot point. I’ll just call it the “Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC.” Only once afterwards did I ever depend on a wake-up call, and the results of that trust were revealed earlier in this piece.
The best advice your travel pal Al can give you is this: take a deep breath and approach that alarm clock the way you would a terrorist who wants to take out your family. Use the Goose Gossage mantra and keep working on that bastard until you master it – even if it means missing dinner. Just tell yourself “NO alarm clock is going to make a pussy out of me!”

Al would bring a clock with him, but has learned the TSA doesn’t appreciate ticking carry on luggage. Read his column every Monday here.