And the Winner of the Seeing Eye Wake-Up Song Contest Is…

…no one. They didn’t play any song at all over the intercom to wake us up on our last day at the SeeingEye!

Speedo is already settling in at home.

A majority of the Seeing Eye graduates going home with our dogs yesterday were scheduled on early morning flights. Each of the four Seeing Eye trainers in our class was charged with driving a van full of Seeing Eye graduates and their dogs from Morristown to Newark International Airport, then arranging for special passes to accompany us through TSA, and finally seeing to it that each dog-and-human team reach the right gate for take-off.

My new dog and I were scheduled for the 4:30 a.m. van, which means my wake-up call did not come as a song. It came as an individual phone call at 2:30 in the morning. That call was followed by a knock on my dorm-room door at 3:30 a.m. My assigned trainers wanted to make absolutely sure I was awake.

My new dog and I are settling in extremely well here in Chicago so far, but I’m feeling a vague sense of jet lag. Maybe she is, too. As I write this note, she is sleeping under my desk, keeping my feet warm. Awwwww!

But back to the wake-up call contest. Just about everyone who was flying home yesterday had left for the airport before 5:30 a.m., the time the Seeing Eye wake-up call is usually played over the intercom. No trainers were there yesterday to decide which song to play, and hardly anyone was left there to hear the song if they’d played one. My guess is that the few remaining students were woken up yesterday the same way I was: each got a phone call and/or a knock on their dorm-room door (but at the much more reasonable time of 5:30 a.m.!)

During each of the four “park times” on Wednesday, the day before our departure, I regaled the trainers with new song suggestions I’d received from you blog readers. Many of your ideas got good reviews, but it’ll be ten more years before I find out if they really did add any of your suggestions to their repertoire. It’s my plan to work with this new magnificent dog of mine for at least a decade!

I was blown away by how many of you responded to that little ditty blog post I wrote. You came up with some good ones! So forget what I said about no one winning. Everyone was a winner, right? So here’s the deal: anyone who got their song suggestion to me before we took off on Thursday will soon receive an email message from me with Speedo’s real name in the message. Stay tuned, and…thank you.