Alarm 1, Jesse 0

This post is brought to you by: The Black Keys - 10 A.M. Automatic

I hate my alarm clock.

It has been in my family for as long as I can remember. It should be a treasured possession - a valued heirloom. Instead, my alarm clock is the source of up to 83% of my stress every day. Well, maybe not that much, but you get the point.

If I remember correctly, I inherited this alarm clock from someone else in my family - either my sister or my parents. I was quite young so the details are a bit fuzzy, but I remember being proud and excited to have an alarm clock of my own. It made me feel more grown-up in a way. It’s the only alarm I’ve used since then, but recent events have made me decide that it’s time for a change.

For starters, I’ve always hated the horrendous schreeching tone the alarm emits. It’s the most painful sound that has ever made its way into my little ear canals. Seriously. It’s the really old school generic alarm tone, that simply goes “BEEP BEEP BEEP”, ad infinitum. I know that doesn’t seem so bad, but it’s at an incredibly high volume (piercing, actually), and at just the right frequency to make you want to smash random things with a softball bat. It’s excruciating.

What’s worse is that this sound has plagued my wakeups for so long that it’s like Kryptonite or something. See, almost every TV show, commercial, or movie uses the same alarm sound clip - I swear it’s recorded straight off my alarm clock! So I’ll be sitting on the couch one night when a random toothpaste commercial comes on. The scene starts with a woman tucked tightly in her bed and then suddenly her alarm goes off. The wailing beeps are identical to my clock’s, and I’m instantly thrown into a convulsing seizure from the horrible sound. It’s like nails down a chalkboard multiplied by a billion.

Then you have my alarm clock’s sheer stupidity of design and operation. It’s a near impossibility to accurately set the time on the first try. The tiny plastic buttons have an enormous resistance, making it a daunting task to press them just right. To set the current alarm you have to hold one button in and press another button once for each minute forward. These things are seriously difficult to press, and inevitibly your one finger slips off the set button and you have to repeat the process. If that wasn’t annoying enough, somehow the buttons are flaky and if you slip off one of the buttons it starts changing the CURRENT time, not the alarm time. So then you have to spend 5 minutes resetting the current time, then set the alarm time all over again, praying the whole time you don’t mess up again. And of course if you go 1 minute past your desired alarm time you have to cycle through the whole hour to get back. You can’t hold the minute button to quickly cycle the minutes either, you have to jab it once for each minute. What an infuriatingly asinine design!

Oh, and if the power ever even hiccups during the night, you can kiss your wake-up call goodbye. There’s nothing I love more than waking up at 10:00 AM and looking at an alarm clock flashing “12:00″ in big, bold, mocking red numbers. And what’s with the whole 9-minute snooze increments? I know that when I’m struggling to keep my eyes open at the butt-crack of dawn I can easily calculate how many 9-minute snooze sessions I can enjoy before I’m really late. Like adding that extra minute was so hard?

I’ve dealt with these frustrations for years, but this morning’s events sent me over the edge. I went to bed a bit too late last night but made sure to double-check the alarm before I zonked out. Time set for 6:30? Check. AM?? Check. Little alarm button switched on? Check. Current time accurate? Check. Welp, that should be it! I passed out quickly, confident that I would awake at the specifed hour. A couple slams of the snooze might occur first, but whatever…

Fast forward 9 hours. It’s 8:30 AM and I’ve awoken peacefully… Wait, peacefully?! Something’s not right here… The birds are chirping! The sun is streaming through my window! This could only mean one thing - Nooooo! Sure enough, I had overslept two whole hours. I shot a glare at the alarm clock and quickly noticed the “Alarm On” light was still activated. That usually means that I set the clock for PM instead of AM. I got up and checked the alarm time, but it was still set for 6:30 AM. And still waiting to activate. What!?

The only thing I can attribute this brazen act of wakery-defiance to is the flaky Alarm switch. It’s a tiny little sliding switch that has two positions (on and off, amazingly). The contacts inside must be in pretty rough shape because when I switch it on the indicator light on the display tends to fade on and off if the slider isn’t pushed up juuust right. However, it’s been like this for literally years and it’s never actually failed to activate the alarm.

So, since I had to waste two hours of comp time at work to make up for my alarm clock’s deficiency, I will be shopping for a replacement ASAP. Feel free to shoot me some recommendations. Post some alarm clock hate too.