I’m not a morning person. I was doing my normal thing this morning if hitting snooze 3 or 4 times before I got up. But one time the snooze button didn’t work right, the alarm went off again a few seconds later. I hit it again, a few seconds later the alarm went off AGAIN.
Then I realized the phone was ringing…
I hit the snooze button for an hour every morning. When I use my cell as a back-up alarm clock, I never set the ringer with my usual ringtone. Erm, anymore. I vaguely recall once opening and closing the phone, effectively hanging up on whoever was calling. I was asleep, though, so that memory is kind of fuzzy. 
Sorry, whoever you were!
Our morning wakeup is our TV. We are roused to the dulcet tones of ABC morning news. With the headlines the way they are today, we can’t even pretend to sleep in…
Anybody ever use the iPod alarm clock function? In my third-generation iPod, all it does is a quick 1 or 2 second series of beeps. That’s it. I don’t know why they didn’t have it keep beeping until you hit a button.
My alarm clock is my phone.
I set it to make a horrid noise like a train whistle. Way more effective than that wind-up clock thing I also have… but the wind-up clock thing doesn’t have to be plugged in.
Multiple redundancy, people. Multiple redundancy. 
I’m a snooze jockey. As such, I have three alarm clocks: My PDA, my cell phone, and my wife’s cell phone. The first two, which I keep right by the bed, are staggered at 5-minute intervals each set to 10 minute snoozes – because when I’m really groggy “dismiss” is spelled exactly the same as “snooze” so two devices gives me a bit of a failsafe. On the off chance that, in addition to identical spellings, my grogginess convinces me that both devices are exactly the same and I just wasn’t pursuasive enough the last time, my wife’s cell phone is designed to go off. Very. Fecking. Loudly. And it’s located where it is necessary for me to get up in order to disable it, and timed to go off when, in getting up and having the fog partially lifted, my brain will now realize I am at the exact moment where I have only enough time left for my usual morning routine, rather than having a little extra time to sit and have a smoke and clear out the cobwebs in my head.
I just bought a new alarm-clock-radio that is awesome from Wal-Mart for $18.
It has an internal battery and clock so it always has the correct time. Even if the power goes out, or you unplug it and move it, or daylight saving time, or new out of the box, it always has the correct time (you do need to make a one time adjustment for your time zone).
It also allows you to set your wake up time for M-F and you never have to turn the alarm on or off for weekends.
My college roommate once set her stereo to go off at eight in the morning with the opening of Pink Floyd’s “Time” at top volume … without telling us.
I have never woken up so scared shitless in my life. But she damn well didn’t miss her exam.
I actually leave my alarm set on the weekends. It’s one of my great joys in life to turn it off, roll over and go back to sleep.
I never use an alarm clock. I sleep until I’m done sleeping. I’ve been lucky the last few years in that I can pretty much go in when I want as long as I put my time in. The truth is though, I’m in long before anyone else in my office, so it doesn’t really matter.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the Victory Roll.
We use the radio as our alarm. It’s set to just before the hour (or just before the half hour) so I can hear the news, and then if I hear the news a second time, it’s basically my warning to get up (news is every 30 minutes in the morning, it’s a rock station). Otherwise, there is one segment about 10 minutes later which definitely gets me up.
The Wife does this, but she gets the beeps, then hits a button so just the TV is on. Then she turns the volume down, so it doesn’t wake me, THEN she gets up and slams the bathroom door, talks to the cats, showers, comes out, slams the closet door, gets dressed then tells me she’s leaving. :rolleyes:
Then an hour later, my cell phone beeps at me.
That’s all well and good if you don’t live in an apartment building, hook up with someone, and end up not sleeping at home. There is nothing so awful as being unable to sleep at six in the morning (after you’ve had a long night yourself) because the guy below you’s alarm clock WILL NOT STOP BEEPING. This happened to us three times at our last place. We never ever saw the guy and of couse he wasn’t home while this was happening.
What kind of alarm clock doesn’t turn off? I guess it must have turned off eventually, but it was at least two hours later.
I was under the impression that most alarm clocks would continue beeping FOREVER until turned off.
I’ve heard various stories about people living in apartments having to endure a neighbor’s beeping alarm clock for hours or days.
A few months back, I spent the night in the emergency room. As 6:30 a.m. approached, I started obsessing over the fact that back at home, my alarm clock was about to go off, and there would be nobody there to shut it off. I got home around 11 a.m., and it wasn’t beeping. Either it shuts itself off, or I had forgotten to set it in the first place and worried myself to pieces for nothing.
When I was in art school, I lived on minimal sleep and was exhausted most of the time. Eventually I started turning off my alarm without even realizing it, so I moved the clock across the room. That worked for a while, then I would get up, turn it off, and go back to bed–again without waking up enough to know what I was doing (my roommate told me I was doing this). So my solution, which did the trick, was to wrap my clock in about four layers of masking tape. It forced me to wake up enough to fight through all of it to make the horrible, horrible noise stop.
We got a rather similar one, but instead of a battery backup, it sets itself by the radio signal from the NIST or whoever. So, if it gets unplugged or loses power, as soon as it gets plugged back in it’ll synch up with the radio signal and bam! Correct time. Never have to set it. It also has the M-F alarm option, which is nice.
But, I’m really really hard to wake up. I mean, a person can wake me up pretty easily, but I can get used to just about any alarm and sleep right through it, not even bothering to turn it off. Which brings me to what I wanted to tell moonstarssun about, the alarm that finally worked for me (the one I would set for days on which I absolutely had to get up on time): I took an electric appliance timer, set it for wake-up time, and plugged the vacuum into it, setting it near the bed but with the switch in a hard-to-reach place. Worked every time.
I bought a similar Emerson radio from Radio Shack.
That’s great! I’ll have to keep that one in mind…except that I’ll end up divorced.