My backup alarm clock is a simple affair, and it seems to work in exactly the same way as every other generic alarm clock: one alarm, one time button, an hour and a minute button (each of which advances unbearably slowly) and a snooze button that lets you sleep for seven more minutes. However, I discovered something as I was setting the alarm: if you push the minute and hour buttons simultaneously, it’ll reset to 12:00a, which is quite handy when the alternative is pressing the minute button 45 times.
So I was wondering: since I’ve always assumed that the generic alarm clocks out there basically all used the same logic (probably licensed from the same company), do all alarm clocks do this? Is this a basic feature of alarm clocks that I, during 20 years of life, have never found out about? Is this the sort of thing everyone knows? Or is my alarm clock special in some way? Does it have a purpose, for which it was granted superpowers by some benevolent diety?
My alarm clock does this too! I discovered it a fair while ago. I had to change both the minute and hour of the alarm to a point quite far away from its original setting (something like 8:30am to 7:00am), so I pressed both buttons, hoping it would increase both at the same time. The reset was a somewhat pleasant surprise.
It doesn’t do the same thing when setting the actual time (rather than the alarm), but of course there’s an easy way around that - unplugging and replugging it.
One weird thing that I discovered a couple of days ago happened when I pressed the sleep and alarm buttons simultaneously. It displayed an increasing number that started at something like “0:46”, and was advancing a little more slowly than the numbers usually advance when setting the time/alarm. I couldn’t figure out what the heck that timer was for, so I assumed it was a bug in the clock. But, just a minute or two ago, I investigated it a little more closely (for the sole purpose of this reply), and discovered that the first digit is always the last digit of the minutes part of the current time, and the last digit is increasing by one per second! I have found the fabled Seconds Display on my generic alarm clock!!
So, of course, after reading to OP, I had to go back into the bedroom to check if my alarm clock had the magic “reset to 12:00 AM” command, and it does! Things you never thought you’d learn, you learn on the SDMB.
Yep, happens on mine when you press the snooze button as well - funny when you discover these new behaviors in a simple thing . . .
And yep, that would be me. Did you post there under that name? Because it’s not particularly ringing any bells, but that could just be because I’ve seen you here.
I posted there under the name BigEars. Towards the end of my posting career, I changed my name to Boss. Luckily, my posts have been wiped from the server, so there’s no incriminating evidence of my stupidity back then :).