Wake-Up Call

In the days before smartphones, when you stayed in a hotel, rather than traveling with an alarm clock (though those folding ones were mighty cute) or learning how to use the clock in your room, you placed a "wake-up call." You'd call the front desk the night before to put in your time request, and fairly faithfully, the desk clerk, or an automated system, would make your room phone ring at a particular time, so that you wouldn't miss your meeting or your airport shuttle or anything else. It was pretty dependable--as long as you got up when you got the call. With no "snooze button," the wake-up call was highly effective--if you heeded it when it came.

I suspect that far fewer people use the wake-up call method these days. After all, you can easily set your smartphone for multiple alarms with multiple ringtones and multiple snooze options. It is no longer necessary to involve a desk clerk or the clerk's automated system. The problem is, whether the "wake-up call" is from a clerk or from your own phone," it only works if you're listening and responding.

Each day, whether we are in a hotel room or not, whether we have requested it or not, we get "wake-up calls." Do we answer them? Do we respond right away, or do we simply answer, but keep "sleeping?" Sometimes, the "phone" rings just once. If we ignore the "call," will we make our shuttle or meeting or life change? If we answer, but don't leap into action, has the "wake-up call" actually done anything?

The wake-up call was a brilliant invention for a traveling world, a little way to assure that things on the road could run as smoothly as they did in the comfort of one's own home. The convention may be practically obsolete, but its lesson is not. A wake-up call only works if you answer it, and if you react accordingly. Otherwise, it might as well be a phone solicitor or a prank call, forgotten the moment you hang up, and useless for moving you forward at all.

When your "wake-up call" comes, will you answer the phone? Will you get up and act, so that you miss nothing, or better yet, that you get something? Or will you find yourself still fast asleep, because you answered, but did nothing else? A wake-up call is just that--a small service by life's sometimes sleepy desk clerk. And it will only work if we answer--and act.