My Uncle Tom was one of those annoying people who popped out of bed in the morning like a breakfast pastry from the toaster. Only instead of fruit filling, he was filled with energy and jokes, with an icing of a sunny smile and merriment in his eyes.

I avoided Uncle Tom in the morning. To be fair, I avoid pretty much everyone in the morning, but I especially hide under the covers from Pop-Tart people. I want to slap them with soggy pancakes.

It was the great philosopher Punit Ghadge who said, “Keep the dream alive: Hit the snooze button.”

If it wasn’t for the fact that I have a 60-something-year-old bladder, I’d probably still be in bed right now. Once I get my pillow positioned just right, I see no reason to disturb perfection.

In college, I once signed up for a 7:45 a.m. class. I nearly flunked. It wasn’t because the class was difficult. Actually, it might have been, but I wouldn’t know. I rarely rolled out of bed in time to find out.

The reason I signed up for a class that early in the morning was that I had not yet discovered the wisdom of the great philosopher Moss Hart, who said, “So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o’clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience.”

Despite my failure to go to the class that would have taught me how to do the job I’d eventually have (oh, the irony!), I did squeak out of the institution with a diploma. And I was determined to be a good and productive worker.

I lined right up with the philosophy of Gehenna Toss, who wrote, “Every single day I wake up and make up my mind that I am going to work really hard. Then my mind laughs at me and says ‘Good joke.’ Then we laugh for some more time and I go back to bed.”

But irony heaped itself upon irony. In my first job out of college, I was expected to be at the office at 5:30 a.m. That makes no sense. As Robert Heinlein philosophized, “Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”

Let me stay in bed a couple of more hours and chances are that I’ll dream of a better way to do the job.

I didn’t know that there were two 5:30s in the same day. It turns out that there are.

At 5:30 a.m., I and several of my coworkers would stumble, bumble and shuffle into the building, grunt greetings if we felt up to it, then clack away at our keyboards. We weren’t sure what, if anything, showed up on our screens. We’d have to open our eyes for that.

Then came Dawn.

I don’t mean morning. No, we were afflicted by a sunny young co-worker named Dawn — one of those morning people. She bubbled into the office every morning, all smiles and sunshine.

It was disgusting.

Some people just don’t know how to be happy, and by happy, I mean wallow in a comforting quilt of morning blahs, boring routine and unattainable potential.

But I’m learning to become more open-minded. I even have a couple of friends now who are openly Morning Persons, and I’m OK with that — as long as they do that nonsense someplace else and let me sleep.

As the old saying goes, “I’m not really a morning person; I’m a morning survivor.”

Actually, 2 p.m. is when Cole takes his first afternoon nap. Wake him at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.