Alarm clocks, you got to have them. Well, maybe you don’t need them if you don’t live by any kind of schedule, but most people do need them. When I was in Elementary School my alarm clock was my mom, brother, or babysitter, but when I went to Middle School it was time for me to start taking care of business by myself, and so my mom got me my own alarm clock.
It was like most alarm clocks. Black with a red LED display. It featured a radio, a snooze button, backup battery, and all the other standard features. It also featured the most annoying buzzer sound to have ever existed. The sound wasn’t just annoying, it was irritating, the kind of noise that could make your head explode if you heard it for more than a few seconds at a time. It’s pitch was higher than nails on a chalkboard, it was louder than the Fourth of July, and it drove me crazy for nearly six years.
I’m a light sleeper. It doesn’t take much to wake me, and so this alarm clock was way overboard. I mean, I guarantee that this thing could have woken up the most heaviest of sleepers from two rooms away. I don’t know what the designer was thinking when they created the noise that this thing made, probably something sadistic. It was terrible.
In a way, I think I must have been torturing myself on purpose. I’m no masochist, but the simple fact that I could have solve the alarm clock problem with ease, makes me wonder why I never did anything about it. I could have changed the alarm to radio mode, so that it would just play a radio station instead of that annoying noise. I never did that, though, because I feared that the tuner dial would get moved and I wouldn’t wake up at all. I could have gotten a new alarm clock. I suppose I didn’t want to ask my mom to get me a new one because I didn’t want her to spend more money than she could afford, especially since the alarm clock wasn’t really broken. I had a job when I was sixteen, but it never even crossed my mind to buy a new alarm clock. I guess I just wanted to spend my money on other things.
Almost as bad as the existence of the alarm clock, was the fact that I was a major snoozer. I would hit the snooze button maybe three or four times every morning, and it was a ten minute snooze. That means I was basically torturing myself for forty minutes every morning. If I had set my alarm for the time I was supposed to wake up, I’d have only heard that annoying noise one time each day, but no, I heard it three or four times a day, every day, for six years.
I remember that when high school graduation was approaching, I had planned to take that thing outside to the back patio, swing it around with it’s cord as fast as I could, and then smash it into the ground. That idea crossed my mind more than a few times. I never did it, though. In my mind, I hated the alarm clock, but it was still perfectly good so I didn’t have the heart to destroy it. I ended up donating it to a thrift store. In some ways I feel bad about doing that. Some poor schmuck may have bought it, and, even today, they may be suffering from the annoying noise. I hope not. No one deserves that punishment.
Today, I use my watch as an alarm clock. It actually has five different alarms that I can set for different days, so it is more advanced than the one I used in high school and middle school. It makes a pleasant beeping sound. It isn’t very loud, but it is just fine at waking me up. It has a five minute snooze that can be activated only one time, so I don’t spend all morning snoozing. I’m a lot happier with that watch as an alarm clock, and what boggles my mind, is that I could have been doing that the entire time I was in high school. I could have used something other than the most annoying alarm clock to have ever existed.