Alarm

Back in 2006 I had a job I wasn't particularly fond of, to put it mildly. I also had a tendency to drink lots of beer with friends on work nights. I started work at 8 am, which meant getting up early, and I used my phone as an alarm. To make it even worse it was often freezing cold in the morning.

The upshot of this was that I developed a powerful emotional association with my phone's default alarm tone. It's pretty obnoxious to begin with, but after a while every time I heard it I was brought back to that awful feeling of waking up sleep deprived and hung over, braving the cold to catch a bus (or, later, drive) to my shitty job so I could spend the day either with nothing to do but sweep filthy floors, or madly cleaning cars with not enough time to do it properly and then getting chewed out for not doing it properly.

The good news is that the effect has finally more or less worn off. On the scale of things I don't like, the unpleasantness of hearing the alarm tone has finally pretty much dropped below the small effort required to change the tone when I set the alarm.

Another small victory.