I don’t use an alarm clock, since I wake up at pretty much the same time every morning including weekends. But my wife does. She sets hers ahead about seven minutes or so, but leaves the clock facing outward toward the door — I suppose it looks nicer as a part of the furniture or something. It beeps and buzzes. Loudly. Very loudly. She lies there motionless as though she doesn’t hear it. (Although, she hears from the bedroom to the kitchen when I change the trash bag.)
After maybe a minute or two of this incredibly loud clock-shrieking, just before it will have torn a hole in space-time, her hand almost involuntarily finds its way to the nightstand and fumbles around until it latches onto the snooze button. Lather, rinse, repeat four or five more times. It is after the second time that I take her her coffee, kiss her, tell her “Good morning” and leave her coffee by the bed. When she finally opens her eyes, she has to sit up to see the time.
Still not even feeling the floor beneath her feet, she has to do some base 60 math. Let’s see, 06:03:12 minus 00:07:38 is… ah, fuck it, not yet 6:00. And as she sips her lukewarm coffee, trying to focus her eyes on the morning weather report, she contemplates the logistics of making her way to the bathroom, into which she eventually stumbles and closes the door. As soon as she turns on the shower, of course, here goes the clock. Brrrant! Brrrant! Brrrant! Brrrant! Brrrant! Brrrant! Brrrant! Brrrant!
It sounds like the mating call of a drunken rhinoceros. I run to the bedroom to shut it off, but even after all this time, I have not mastered the fine art of pushing the right combinations of buttons while holding my thumb over the proper lever and facing Mecca. I slap it. I shake it. I curse it. The face of a demon appears on its surface and laughs at me as I struggle to shut it off. Finally, I manage to change it from the obnoxious pounding of short-cycle screams to the obnoxious voices of morning radio personalities. I turn down the volume — the only button larger than a pin head — and leave it be.
In my opinion, alarm clocks are the spawn of hell.
I have a great alarm clock, when it goes off it turns on the radio at a very low volume and gradually gets louder. Much less jarring. You can also have it play a CD as its alarm, but I prefer the radio.
I can’t get past this part. My husband doesn’t even know how to make coffee, much less understand how nice it would be to bring me a cup of fresh-brewed java in the morning. You do that for her every morning and she doesn’t have the decency to shut off her alarm clock? What a bitch.
If I promise to never use an alarm clock again, will you come be my husband and bring me coffee in bed?
I have never understood the reasoning for setting one’s clock fast. It just makes no sense to me.
It was a bit of a chore but years ago I was able to locate an alarm clock sans a snooze button. I find such buttons to be addictive and that’s one monkey I don’t need on my back – well, in my bed, at least.
I’ve never used a snooze button - when the alarm goes off, I get up. End of story.
My sister, on the other hand…her alarm would go off around 5 am, and ring constantly until I would get up around 5:45, wander into her room, and shut the alarm off. I would then shower and then finally drag her out of bed after I was done in the bathroom. She would complain every morning that I had stolen her turn in the shower. This happened every morning for three years. Then I moved out.
Some of us find it so hard it drag our bodies out of bed that early that we have to set the alarm rather early and screw with our own minds to get us out of bed…
Mine is set to be fast, but the deal is that I don’t know how fast it’s set. Seriously. I don’t look at it when I’m in there normally, only when I wake up and look at the time as I’m hitting the alarm off button. I’m so groggy at that hour that I have no idea how to figure out what time it really is, so I stagger to the bathroom and take a shower. Works for me.
My annoyance is that the new fan we bought for the bedroom is too loud. I have a slight hearing problem when there’s a lot of background noise, and my alarm clock is quiet. It plays nature sounds, and it’s hard to distinguish the running brook alarm from the whooshing fan. Fortunately my husband is a lighter sleeper, and will notice it eventually and wake me up. I think I need to experiment with the volume and picking another nature sound, as now this has happened two mornings in a row.
Wow, your wife is lucky to have someone like you to wake her up. I’m like her; I’m generally hard to wake, and poor snooze-button discipline has led alarm clocks to have little effectiveness on me. I wish I had someone to bring me my coffee and remind me that yes, it is time to get up.
You sound quite sweet and gentlemanly to put up with her clock, in fact.
During the normal times of the day, I know my alarm clock is fast. I know to subtract however many minutes. When I am woken up by an alarm, though, I’m so crazy disoriented that I don’t realize it’s set ahead. I trick myself into getting up and moving about.
My roommate last year would press the snooze button five or six times before she would get up. My mom gets up after pressing the snooze button, gets in the shower for the next 45 minutes, and doesn’t give a damn when her freakin banshee of an alarm clock serenades us all.
At least my roommate this year is very courteous with her alarm clock. She knows the proper etiquette. I just wish it were more widespread.
I dealt with a similar issue by making sure that A) we ‘discussed’ the habit of introducing false information (setting the clock to the wrong time) into our home and B) setting up the clock so that to turn it off one must get up and walk across the room. It’s now WAY over there on the dresser…most pointedly NOT right next to the bed.
I was briefly living with two other people who were also both working in the performing arts industry. They were working on the same show while I was working on another. Their show ended its run before mine, and so they went to the wrap party one night. A party where there was a generous amount of alcohol, freely provided.
My one housemate and his friend had to drag home our other housemate. Literally, they each had an arm over their shoulders and were half-carrying this almost limp body.
They dumped drunken roomie in bed, set the alarm for an early morning wake-up, cranked the volume to the LOUDEST SETTING POSSIBLE… and then hid the alarm clock so it wouldn’t be easily found.
I woke up the next morning to the sound of roomie destroying the place saying “Noise! Noise! Stop noise!”
When I was in college, I shared a house with two guys. My bedroom and one of the guy’s bedrooms were upstairs, the other bedroom was downstairs.
Of course, the guy downstairs had to be the one who’d be the snooze alarm freak. You might think this was actually a benefit until you realize he’d often sleep in until, say, noon. His alarm would be set for much earlier, like 9 am, and yes, he’d be hitting the snooze button the whole time. Worse yet, it’d be at ear-piercing levels and yet it seemed to take forever for him to wake up and hit the snooze. So you’d hear this alarm screaming every 9 minutes while you were eating breakfast, trying to watch the morning news, getting ready for class, etc.
There was an episode of Millenium where four demons were talking about humanity, and one mentioned that the alarm clock is the most diabolical thing ever invented, and it was invented by man. The demon said something like, “Sleep is the only time they have actual peace or happiness and they invent something to rob themselves of it.”
I can usually set myself to wake up at a certain time, but I do use the alarm clock in my cell phone if I’m worried about getting up for something important or have reason to believe I won’t be able to get up (like taking an hour nap after not sleeping for two days straight). It is a horrible experience to be woken up by a machine. Especially telephones. Not only do you have the irritating sound snapping you awake but you now have to hunt for the damn phone in a groggy state and wonder who is calling when reasonable people are asleep. Stupid calls at 4 in the afternoon…
Nine minutes is way too long for a snooze. It gives me enough time to get solidly back to sleep. My next alarm clock I shall scour the world for one with a four minute snooze.
I’m also one that sets the clock ahead, fifteen minutes in my case. I know it’s foolish, you know it’s foolish - let’s not discuss it, OK?
Philster, I can see it. I’m moving in with my boyfriend, who likes to press snooze at least five times and have the alarm set fast. I get up the first time every time and need to have my clock precise.
