Knocker-up in action

Commuting has been part of the human experience since the Industrial Revolution. Ever since the workplace and the home got firmly disentangled, people have been waking up and resignedly making their way to their place of employment. The amount of culture that has developed about the idea of commuting is enormous, including the “knocker-up” of 19th and early 20th century Britain who served, before the advent of universal alarm clocks, as a wake-up call for workers by tapping on their windows in the morning with a long pole.

It is probably safe to say that few have ever really enjoyed their commute [1], a feeling best exemplified by the opening scene of the movie Office Space, from which this excerpt comes (warning, very bad language):

Commuting has had a fair amount of academic analysis applied to it. The…

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