Alarm clock, phone, whatever

Mine sure as hell doesn’t. It’s actually kind of annoying. How dare the clock decide to “give up” on me because I’ve hit snooze too many times?

Okay, I know it’s weird, but if I’ve got to get up early, I set my alarm for about one hour before I have to get out of bed, just so I can gradually wake up, instead of having to leap out of bed as soon as it goes off.

Not with this damn thing, I can’t! I can’t doze contentedly, relying on my clock to ensure I’ll get up in time. Noooo . . . I’ll doze off and wake up and see I needed to be getting dressed half an hour ago because my alarm decided it had given me enough chances.

Right now I work at company that starts relatively late in the day and is pretty casual about when people come in (technically we start at 10, but most work happens after 6pm. Most of our designers wander in around 11 or lunchtime), but back when I had to be up early every morning I worked out a good combination:

1 radio alarm set for 6.
1 super-loud buzzer alarm set for 7 and placed in the next room.

The radio would wake me up gently and would usually be enough to get me out of bed. For those days when I fell back to sleep or just never woke up, however, the buzzer was an effective “oh shit get up NOW!” alarm that I had to actually get out of bed and cross the room to turn off.