(Photo by Christina Snyder, from the Lifehacker site)
I used to hate them, and now I have no real reason to have one in my house.
Except for a small battery-operated number that I never use, alarm clocks are passe in my life. And this is not because I don't need to wake up at a certain time (which I do) or because I've trained myself to wake up without help (are you kidding?). But just about everything comes with an alarm these days.
Sometime within the next decade you might see alarm clocks in a museum exhibit with the manual typewriter, the LP record, the eight-track tape, the DOS computer. Although I miss some of these blasts from the past, I can only say good riddance to the alarm clock.
I saw an interesting survey on the Lifehacker Web site the other day. Admittedly, Lifehacker readers tend to the geeky and are likelier to buy into technology for technology's sake. But as of Monday, 6,111 people (including myself) responded to the question of what equipment has replaced the alarm clock. Here's the breakdown:
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Cell phone -- 59% (3,585 votes)
Personal note: I was one of the 3,585. Surprising; I'm usually not in the majority about anything.
The classic alarm clock -- 26% (1,577 votes)
Watch -- 1% (45 votes)
Computer -- 3% (154 votes)
Dog/cat/pet -- 1% (71 votes)
The kid(s) -- 2% (150 votes)
An iPod/MP3 player/portable device -- 4% (227 votes)
Other -- 5% (302 votes)
Total Votes -- 6111
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A question here: The survey doesn't differentiate between the old-style alarm clock and the clock-radio. I've used both, but I've found the only type of radio station to be reliable in waking me up is an all-news station. That's what I used in college. The alarm would go off, the news would click on, and I could find out whether space aliens took the planet hostage while I slept. And if they didn't, it meant I had no excuse to miss my 8:00 class.
As mentioned, I use my cell phone. It's pretty automatic; I set it once for the day and time (5:15 a.m. Monday through Friday), decide on a ring tone, and I'm good to go. I also have a "warning" alarm to remind me to quit whatever I'm doing and point myself toward work. To this day I'm not sure whether I'm ADD or not; it's safer to assume I am when it's time to get to work.
I've also used a watch, back when I wore one. Too quiet, and too easy to throw against the wall when the alarm goes off. My dog has been my wake-up service a few times, but she wakes me up when she wants rather than when I want. Still, she's a handy backup.
When I last owned a landline phone, I used the voice-mail system to wake me up. I'd call, leave a message, and set it to ring at a certain time. This was actually kind of cool, like having your own wake-up service. The only drawback was that the wake-up message was in my own voice, and that's probably the last thing I want to hear so early in the morning. There are times when I scare even myself.
Wives and girlfriends also make handy wake-up devices, but to my experience they're much harder to program than a DVD player. I've never been able to get one out of the default setting, which sounds something like "GET YOUR (!!!) OUT OF BED, YOU LAZY ESSOBEE!"
In the interest of geekiness I've tried using my computer as a wake-up system. I wish I remember how I did it; it was a really cool trick. I wrote a shell script (think .bat file for you old DOS types) that would crank up the computer volume, play a handful of carefully-selected wake-up songs, and pop my day's agenda onto the screen. Songs included "Iron Man" (Eric Dolphy), "Tonight At Noon" (Charles Mingus), "Countdown" (John Coltrane), and maybe a few bluegrass tunes. Fast, rousing, high-octane stuff. But -- welcome to the world of computers -- it takes too long and requires too much thought to set it up as a wake-up system. I got a computer to simplify and enrich my life, not to make it more complicated.
But I'm good with that cell phone. I can flip it open and find the snooze button without waking up. And since I need that phone to communicate, I haven't thrown it yet. Even if I do, 5:15 is when my dog's kidneys wake up. When they don't sleep, no one sleeps.
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