I have a mild rant here. I need to get this out of my system. I’ve had a Sharp alarm clock for several years now. It has served its time and been a good alarm clock. In the past few months, there have been a few times it didn’t wake me up though. I don’t know if it didn’t go off or I just didn’t wake up. I’m a pretty light sleeper, but maybe some nights that’s not so true. Anyway, I decided to buy a new alarm clock and see if that helped.
I decided to buy one from eBay since no local store is going to have much of a selection. I wanted to go all out and get just what I wanted. I looked and found that the Oregon Scientific brand looked nice. They’re a bit expensive, but they set themselves by a signal from a cesium clock and seem to have a nice array of features. I wanted something that would set itself and could display the time in 24-hour time. I also didn’t want a projector. So I settled on a particular model. (I can’t remember what model it was. I’ll figure it out later if anyone cares.) I’ve kept the old clock as a backup alarm.
So I got the thing a couple of months ago and realize it’s not so great after all. For one thing, the LED backlight stays lit all the time if you run the clock on AC. I read this before buying, but I expected it to be a dim backlight just bright enough to see it in the dark. The thing is as bright as a night light. I can see anything in the freakin room! It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a night light because night lights don’t sit next to your head! I certainly don’t want to have to worry about changing batteries though, so I’ve learned to deal with this beacon shining from my night stand.
After laying down for my first sleep with this clock, I realize something: you can’t read the display from below it. If it’s tilted up from where you’re looking much at all, it’s just a white display. Not helping that fact is that the mount is tilted backwards. How the hell do they expect me to read the thing while I’m laying in bed? I have to grab it, tilt it forward, and hopefully in my clumsy somnolence, I won’t drop the thing. This was poorly thought out.
The third thing that bothers me about this clock is perhaps the biggest, and really got me this morning. It takes me a long time to go to sleep at night, and it’s equally hard to wake up at such an early time as is required for my job. As such, I tend to hit snooze several times before finally getting up. My old clock has the snooze button on top, almost as big as the clock itself and well away from all the other buttons. Well Oregon Scientific decided it would be best if all the buttons were in a row with no distinguishing tactile features. Not only that, but they put the snooze button right in the middle. Now they did make it considerably longer than the rest of the buttons, but it still is only about 25% as wide as the whole row. Now maybe someone can tell me how I’m supposed to find and hit the thing when I’m half asleep. The light isn’t shining on the button, but it’s sure as hell shining in my eyes!
So this morning apparently in my efforts to hit snooze, I also hit the time zone button right beside it, changing it to eastern time. Now why they would have a button that you press once to change time zones, I don’t know. It seems like it would make more sense to set that while you’re setting the time since it rarely changes. Even worse is putting it next to the snooze button. Eventually my backup alarm went off, signifying my last chance to get up without being very late. (My job isn’t too strict on that since I work by myself, but I try not to push it.) Well when I leaned the new clock forward, I noticed it said 0654 while the old clock said 0601. Oh shit! I assumed that somehow the old clock got behind by an hour since the new clock updates itself. So I hurry to get ready, go hop on the bike, and rush to work. It was over an hour later that I looked at the clock on the wall there and it said it was 0715. Now how could I get up at 0655, get ready, ride 10 minutes to work, work for about an hour, and it be 0715? I explained my confusing story to my work neighbor and asked him if we hit daylight savings time or something. He explained that no we hadn’t and I need to stop smoking crack. It wasn’t until I came home that I saw it was set to eastern time.
In conclusion, I must say that Oregon Scientific makes a clock that’s actually pretty good for telling the time, but is terrible as an alarm clock. That money would have been better spent on a $10 Walmart clock.
