Robot Spare Change

He is who I wake up to every morning. The first face I see in the morning, knowing that it's been watching me all night while I've been asleep. On good days, I can imagine that he's standing guard for me, maybe to protect me from nightmares, but he's really been slacking recently. I've been getting some very crazy, anxious and busy dreams that make my head spin, which makes me think that he might actually be maliciously staring at me while I'm sleeping.

The clock is always wrong, so I never know what time it really is. Every time I try to figure it out that maybe it's 45 minutes late, it turns out that I'm still wrong. Why don't I just adjust it? Pushing any one of its buttons is very, very loud. So loud that I can't stand it. There is absolutely no way of turning it down either. It has a number of tunes for you to choose from to use as the alarm clock ringer, but I can't even use it, because it'll make me leap out of my bed, crash on the floor, fracture something, and wake up the entire house. Maybe the neighbourhood as well. I seem to have an natural ability to wake up at approximately the same time everyday, regardless of when I went to sleep.

One of its special features is its ability to automatically count your change for you, like a high-tech piggy bank. However, that function has the same problem with its volume that bursts my eardrums. It's necessary to set the value of each coin first so it can register it by the coin's size. I don't have spare change, because I take it with me and spend it. I'm one of those people who would make the cashier wait while I count out twenty-three pennies, five nickels, two dimes, one quarter and a loonie to make ninety-three cents.

At night, it's also the last face I see before I go to sleep. I stare at it during fits of insomnia. Sometimes it seems to have an eerie expression. Most of the time the chubby fellow just looks hungry. Hungrily staring at me. Or, maybe it's staring at me and reporting to mission control. Depending on how much it bothers me, if it does at all, I'll turn it slightly away from my head to divert its attention a little bit or completely reposition it and make it look at something else. I wish it would go to sleep. Maybe it does as soon as I do. And if it does, what does it dream of?