India - Magic Alarm Clock

Since coming to India (I have been here five weeks as of yesterday), I have had to get up at different times depending on what I was assigned to do during the day. When I started training here, I had to get up around 6:30 am to make it to work by 8:15 am or thereabouts. Later, when they assigned me to train with my Business Unit, I didn't have to wake up till 8:30 am because my Business Unit was a five minute walk away on the other side of campus. Why am I telling you this? Good question.

You see, every single day that I have been in India (except for one, but I'll get into that later) I have woken up between 5 to 15 minutes before my alarm when off. The one day that I didn't wake up before my alarm was when I was terribly sick the day before and I was up all night "praying to the porcelain gods." Every other day I have woken up well in advance of my alarm, usually about ten minutes.

Now, my alarm happens to also be my work cell phone. This is because of the whole electricity situation and also because there are no clocks in the entire guest house. The people here are on "India Standard Time" so I guess that precludes having any form of time telling device around.

The thing that baffles me, is some times I will even stay up late and I still wake up before my alarm. Also, I have purposely changed the time on my alarm to a few minutes before or after the usual time that I get up...to no avail. I still wake up before the alarm. I've never had this happen to me before so it has been kinda freaking me out. I mean, what is going on inside my head to make me wake up before my alarm every time?

What pisses me off is that this would have been great many times in my life before now. I can think of a few situations where waking up before your alarm can really be useful. In my case it was times when I had finals or school related stuff, or a plane to catch and I needed to be absolutely SURE that I got up. What better way of getting up to an annoying alarm than actually waking up before it so that when it starts going off you are already awake. So, instead of waking you up, the alarm just ends up annoying you. I don't know about you, but I know I can't sleep and be annoyed at the same time.

So...yeah, it's very strange but true. I guess that is true of many things in life...