8:19.
That’s what I remember hearing, to the tune of Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”, every weekday morning for most of three years.
During my second stint at the apartments in Arlington, the same boom box bought in 1993 was my alarm clock and white-noise device. Permanently affixed to WAMU, it would lull me to sleep at night with the sounds of the BBC World Service and wake me up with the somnolent tones of NPR Morning Edition. So naturally, I had to set the alarm well in advance, as that wasn’t going to blast me out of bed.
The time announcements were at weird intervals, but every weekday – 8:19. And if I got out of bed then, I could shower, get dressed, check my email, and leave for the Metro stop in time to get a train that would deliver me to Farragut Square in time to walk to work, buy my big 24-oz Dr Pepper from the Boss on the corner, and walk through the door bang-on 9:30 AM, when my official work day began.
Now, the first alarms start going off just before 7 AM, and depending on where I’m working that day, I need to have showered the night before because there’s not time to make it to the 7:29 light rail that starts the odyssey – and if that light rail is more than 4 minutes late, it’s going to be 8:15 before another train that’s any use comes along. On the other hand, if I’m not going to my own office, the light rail is at 7:45 and I have time to shower, which is helpful. Especially to the end-users, I suppose.
The flip side, of course, is that I’m out of work at 5. In DC, I was out of work at 6, which meant I got home closer to 7. But then again, it was rare to get to bed before midnight in DC, and now I’m glancing at the stairs pretty much anytime past 10 PM. As a result, the 9 o’clock hour – which used to be when the McTeggarts kicked off at the 4Ps – has become a sort of no-man’s-land where it’s too late to start anything serious but too early to go to bed. Not coincidentally, this is usually where the dishwasher gets unloaded and reloaded.
But it’s still weird sometimes to sink into my chair at my desk, rub my eyes, and think “you know, back East I’m not even out of bed yet.”