I was pretty late to class because of this

This was a blog post I had planned to make (I had the pictures and everything sitting on my pc and cellphone for 4 weeks) but of course I forgot when the blogs were due. In any case, as I'm sure everyone who's had a class with me knows, I am often very sleepy in school. Whether it's a late night writing a paper or just being kept awake by the excruciating feeling of a grain of something under my eyelid digging into my cornea, I often come to school in a stupor and sometimes fall asleep.I work in the Registrar's office for scholarship (it's a little boring) and one day, I fell asleep. A couple of minutes later, half awake, I tried to look at the wall clock and see how much longer until the period ended. Unfortunately, I couldn't see see the time because of glare off the clock. By the time I woke up sufficiently to move and see what time it was, I noticed that I was about 5 minutes late. Luckily, the attendance window was only 20 feet away so I promptly grabbed an unexcused tardy before I ran to class and tried to finish a quiz in record time.
The next day, I took some pictures of the clock. This picture is my view of the clock when I was sleeping.As you can clearly see, glare from outside blocks my view of the clock's hands.

Now I move a little closer and it becomes clearer.
Moving even closer makes even more of the clock visible

And being right by it makes it completely clear

Because of the glare off of the clock, I was late. The reason the glare is reduced as I move closer to the clock is that the angle from the light source outside to my eyes changes. The outside light directly hits the clock face and bounces off of it into my eyes when I'm farther away. As I get closer, the angle of incidence between the clock and I changes and the light less and less directly hits the clock and more and more of it becomes visible. The glare is actually polarized light that vibrates in a vertical direction. If I had been wearing polarized sunglasses, I would have been able to see right through it. This very unfortunate incident, upon further inspection, was one that an understanding of physics helps resolve.