The bear

Jan 30, 2016

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you.

– The Stranger, The Big Lebowski

I missed my flight this morning and it was my fault. To say that I put myself in a high risk situation would be an understatement; I was at DNA’s Cyberdelia until closing at 2 AM, then unwisely decided to stop by the old office afterwards. I got into bed at 3:45 AM with a target wake-up time at 4:45 AM to make my 7 AM flight. My 2020 hindsight tells me that I should have gone to find a good coffee instead. My 20100 hindsight tells me that I should have just skipped the whole night.

I’d set myself a cascading series of redundant alarms to hedge against the risk of not waking up, but I was being too clever for my own good by using Siri to activate and list them. I’ll never know why exactly, but none of them went off.

My eyes opened at 6:46 AM when Air Canada called me. In a herculean (and ultimately futile) effort I made it from my pillow to the airline counter at SFO in 24 minutes flat, a new landspeed record from SOMA, but it’d been a hopeless situation the moment I was conscious. I sheepishly approached the counter and rescheduled for the next day.

The only good news is that as I was setting up for multi-device redundancy for the next day’s trip, I noticed that the iPad’s alarm app finally supports playing a song instead of the one of the built-in buzzers. Progress!

Did I make a mistake? Please consider sending a pull request.