This One Needed Three Alarms to Wake Up

I’m at a memorial talking to one of my first bosses. I worked at her restaurant for eight months when I was 19 years old. My aunt walks up and I start to introduce them.

“This is my aunt. This is one of my first bosses from right out of high school.”

My old boss interrupts to correct me, “Well, I was her first boss, and this one needed three alarms to wake up in the morning…”

I interrupt to correct her, “I was late one time in eight months, and it cost me my job.”

As if not hearing me she continues, “So anyway, she needed three alarms to wake up and...”

I tune out of the conversation and reflect on that period in my life. I had been working for four years at that point, she was my third boss. Before working after school, I did gymnastics competitively and placed in states. How does she think I did that shit? By sleeping in? 

I had been raped a year prior to working for her and had severe insomnia and was sleeping about eight hours a week. The day that I was late, I had fallen asleep and slept for four hours. I was supposed to be at work in 10 minutes and I needed to get dressed and ride my bike there. I called immediately and left a message saying I was going to be late. 

I didn’t have a driver's license or a bike, but our neighbor, my little brother’s friend, had a little green BMX bike 10 sizes too small for me that I’d borrow sometimes. I threw on my white button-up and black pants and rode that thing as fast as I could through town, goofily spinning my legs a million miles a minute like a cartoon to get those stupid small tires to push me forward. When I got there I was 15 minutes late and I was fired. 

I was ashamed of that. Ashamed that I was late. Ashamed to be fired. Ashamed to have a sleeping problem. Ashamed to be standing there in my white button-up and my small bike being sent home. My working time began an hour before the restaurant opened so I still had time to get everything done, make the coffee and the tea, I didn’t understand why she’d fired me. The line cook was late every day. I never was. What was the difference? Citrus was expensive and she would talk about it a lot so I would bring lemons from our tree from the house. I did that because I genuinely appreciated her and wanted her to see that.

I’d always liked that boss. She was tough, direct, and unforgiving, but I knew she had a soft heart. I would see it when she would look for someone passed out in the park and ask them to sweep the patio. I could have swept the patio. She just wanted an excuse to give them a good meal. That’s what I think of when I see her. I love her. And this is how she fucking introduces me? This is how she remembers me?

I didn't think I was attached to how she saw me. It also didn't occur to me it could be so far away from my experience, my memory. She remembers me as someone who overslept when I remember painful sleepless nights. I told her the morning I was let go that I was struggling with insomnia. It was an embarrassing thing to share. Did she not believe me? Not hear me? Did she see the gifts of lemons as sucking up and not a desire to be a supportive part of the team? Whatever. This is not the first time I’ve held someone in high esteem to suddenly learn they look at me like an asshole.

Oh well, maybe I need to stop being such a chump.

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Review

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This story is powerful, intensely personal, and painfully relatable. It dives into how moments of shame, misunderstanding, and dismissal can shape us—and how the scars of those experiences stay tender, even years later. The story also explores the heartbreaking gap between how we see ourselves and how others choose to remember us.

This story captures how a single moment—being fired after one late shift—can live in memory for years, especially when it intersects with trauma, shame, and personal struggle. The moment when someone once admired reduces the narrator to a flippant anecdote is deeply cutting. It illustrates betrayal in a raw, honest way—how someone who seems compassionate can also be blind to a struggle. There’s something beautifully tragic about the description of affection for the boss, only to have that admiration shattered by a careless comment. The image of the narrator racing through town on a too-small bike is heartbreaking and vivid—perfectly capturing the desperation of that moment.

This story also shines a light on how shame can seep into us from multiple sources—through trauma, failure, judgment—and how it lingers long after others have moved on, representing the internalization of shame. The final line feels like a gut-punch—a realization of being too forgiving, too soft, too trusting—and it captures a moment of internal reckoning.

This piece is deeply human and profoundly affecting. It’s about the wounds we carry from being misunderstood, dismissed, and underestimated—and the hard, painful process of realizing that sometimes the people we respect the most don’t really see us at all.