John woke with a start, eyes flicking open to scan the darkened space around him, a pale green glow cast from the numbers on his alarm clock highlighted random protrusions and failed to enhance the appearance of the room. After giving his clock a long, fairly blurred stare, it eventually dawned on him that the current time was such that it was too early for him to get up, and yet at the same time, too late for him to go back to sleep. He flopped resolutely back into his bed, determined to simply wait out the clock, pondering the day ahead of him in silence. His thoughts began to wander and dawn passed unnoticed.
Yet again John woke with a start, this time his lapse into awareness triggered by a fairly loud and obnoxious noise which he determined to be coming from his alarm clock. The sound ended abruptly as he placed one hand on the edge of the bed and reached to switch it off with the other. Having miscalculated where exactly the bed ended he instead toppled over the side yanking the alarm clock's plug out of the wall as he attempted to use it to hold him up. In this new and profound silence his face made a dull thud as it struck the carpet.
The upside of bashing your head against the ground in the morning, he reasoned as he gradually slithered off the bed and onto his feet, is that it has a stimulating and revitalizing effect, somewhat akin to a few cups of black coffee with the added bonus that it worked quickly and didn't leave a bad aftertaste in his mouth. With these suddenly regained powers of perception he was able to notice quite a few things that in his normal half asleep morning state might otherwise have missed.
The first thing that struck him was how the sunlight danced about the place in a manner which, much like that of his alarm clock, seemed to bring out the rather shabby quality of his room. The next was that his alarm clock was now lying under his bedside table and stubbornly refused to tell any time at all. In an attempt to right the situation, he plugged it back into the wall resulting in its also thoroughly unhelpful flashing of the time as 12:00, which, he decided, was almost certainly ridiculous. The last thing he noticed before stomping off to the bathroom was a ringing headache.
As it was Friday, casual day, he decided against his normal dark gray slacks, long sleeved shirt, and conservatively striped tie, selecting a plaid tie instead as he grinned at his rebellious spirit. He began to brew a pot of coffee and sat down to read the newspaper. The first article was that caught his eye was something about the president having an affair with roughly 35% of the white house staff, John found himself doubting the credibility of this story and moved on to another that seemed more convincing. Finding non he decided to cancel his subscription to the Times and instead take on out with the Weekly World News, which he felt had much more accurate take on politics.
The whistling of the kettle on the stove dragged him slowly back into the reality of his yellow Formica covered kitchen. He glanced hurriedly at his clock which, to his dismay, told him it was 12:45. In his rush to grab a coffee cup and his coat, he did not bother to consider the time was flashing on and off in such an odd manner. He lurched for the stove, dropped the newspaper and filled his cup with steaming water and impatiently scooping a handful of ground coffee into it. With one arm in his jacket he hurled himself through his front door.
He collided head on with something solid, tumbling back into the door as it clicked shut behind him. He did not remember having a wall in front of his door, and was perplexed by the darkness and the coats that seemed to be hanging from the sky around him. He puzzled over the slight renovations that seemed to have been made to his cubicle. he noticed almost immediately that his chair was missing, the loss of his desk and computer didn't bother him quite so much. He resigned himself to sitting on a cardboard box. Outside the door a faire alarm began to ring, but he was too deeply involved in his work to notice.
