Clocky: hitting that snooze alarm
I am old enough to have been raised with old-fashioned alarm clocks. You know, the kind that ticked loudly, especially on nights when sleep seemed elusive and their sound echoed through the still bedroom air. Their alarms were harsh and jangling, startling a person out of sound sleep with a ring that caused the listener to almost leap out of bed to turn them off in self-defense—but, after all, that was the idea.
But then some genius invented the clock radio and allowed us to be awakened by sweet music from the station of our choice. I can’t recall whether the very earliest clock radios came equipped with snooze alarms, but pretty soon they did, an advance that revolutionized the waking habits of non-morning persons such as myself by allowing us to savor (over and over, if we so desired) that delicious interval between sleep and wakefulness, and the opportunity to plunge back into the former for just a few more minutes. And then just a few more.
Morning people, those who bound out of bed at dawn or shortly thereafter with little but their own internal clocks or the occasional lark to guide them, probably cannot understand what I’m talking about. But night people like me understand that the snooze alarm is one of the greatest inventions of all time, although it has its drawbacks, chief among them the fact that one can fall so very in love with the sleep-wake-sleep-wake short cycle it facilitates that the entire purpose of alarm clocks—to wake up at a certain time—can be effectively negated.
In the meantime, though: bliss! One of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera, understands. As he writes in Chapter 2 of Immortality:
I’m in bed, happily dozing. With the first stirrings of wakefulness, around six in the morning, I reach for the small transistor radio next to my pillow and press the button. An early-morning news program comes on, but I am hardly able to make out the individual words, and once again I fall asleep, so that the announcer’s sentences merge into my dreams. It is the most beautiful part of sleep, the most delightful moment of the day: thanks to the radio I can savor drowsing and waking, that marvelous swinging between wakefulness and sleep which in itself is enough to keep us from regretting our birth.
This in turn reminds me of an invention I first noted some time ago, shortly after I began to blog. And since it’s now the holidays (happy Chanuka to all my Jewish readers, and of course Christmas is following in hot pursuit), I’ll mention it once again, in case you missed it and would like to get one for yourself or a loved (or hated) one.
It’s called “Clocky.” The product description says it all:
Clocky is the alarm clock on wheels that runs away beeping! You can snooze one time, but if you don’t get up, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand up to 3 feet high, and run around your room as if looking for a place to hide. You’ll have to get out of bed to silence Clocky’s alarm. Clocky beeps in an R2D2-like robotic pattern so that you are sure to hear him. He’s kind of like a pet, only he will get you up at the right time! You can set Clocky to run away right when the alarm sounds, or set to snooze one time before he runs away. Clocky features a customizable snooze time up to 9 minutes long. You can also turn off Clockies wheels if you don’t want Clocky to run away one morning.
Disclaimer: I don’t have a Clocky. But I can see the advantages. With it, we’ve come full circle, back to the need to get up in order to silence an alarm clock.
In 2005, when Clocky was first invented, the prototype featured a carpet covering that protected it from damage were it to fall on a hard surface in its frantic attempts to get away. Now I see that the covering has been eliminated, rendering the first line of the limerick I composed back in 2005 inappropriate. But I still like the little verse, so here it is again:
Shag-carpeted, wheeled, it looks schlocky.
But don’t turn your nose up at Clocky.
So, snooze-alarm addict,
Buy one; it’s nomadic,
And plays hard-to-get, this tick-tocky.
“Disclaimer: I don’t have a Clocky.” Well if you want one — or more likely 47 — Clocky you’ll have to supply a secret address for shipping.
Failing that…. WAKE UP!
Getting up and getting out of bed is, quite often, the hardest job I’ll do all day. I hit the snooze button three times each morning before I finally have to get up at quarter after 7.
One thing I’ve always wondered is why is the clock’s snooze always an off number, usually 8 minutes (but I had one that went for 9 minutes?) It can’t be for binary reasons, because even the mechanical clocks I’ve had would snooze for 8 minutes or so.
FWIW, when I get a day off, I like to spend at least an hour or two of it sleeping in. ^_^
Clocky might be the ultimate gag gift because who in their right mind wants to be woken up and pissed off at the same time? Not a good way to start any day.
Our clock radio was near the bed for many years, but more recently I decided to break the snooze button habit and just get up when it beeps (no more lulling talk or music either). Of couse I had to move it all the way across the room. But now there’s actually time to fix my kids breakfast and they are rarely tardy for school anymore as was the case back in the olden snoozy button days. 🙂
To balance the brilliance of “snooze”, the pernicious designers of standardized clock radios also brought us the badly misnamed “sleep” button. It rests right next to all the others and in the darkness of night attracts errant fingers such that come the time one is finally able to lay a tired body down, this button can get pressed to fill the room with midnight radio programming rather than blessed silence, thus requiring a body wake up enough either to a) figure out the arcane sequence of button presses that turns the damn thing off again or, far more likely, b) reach around tight corners for the power cord, yank it out, feel it back into place again once the noise has abated (hopefully not touching finger to metal prong while the 110AC is contacted), reset the clock, reset the alarm, and then lie in the dark remembering with fondness those now long-gone moments of sleepiness and anticipated slumber.
No human owned by a cat needs a mechanical alarm clock of any type: if you haven’t seen “Cat Man Do,” you’ll enjoy it–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ffwDYo00Q
I was a night owl as a young man. Now i like to be up before the sun. Where did I go wrong?
Clocky sure looks intriguing. I’m not sure whether it would fascinate or terrify my cats, but the potential for much merriment and amusement is definitely there.
Cats are not 100% effective as wakeup devices, in my experience. Kira usually manages to get me out of bed, but sometimes she falls down on the job. Cats like to snooze too, after all, even more than humans do.
I am not surprised your liking radios when in sleep mode, given your NY origins of mucho noise 24/7. My roommate my freshman year in college was from West End Ave. in Manhattan, and he once drove me batty turning on the radio to go to sleep, waking me up. Though to his credit, when he found out about my reaction, he pretty much stopped that behavior.
I was raised in the county, and am accustomed to waking up without an alarm. I use alarms when I HAVE to get up. Immediately.
When I was in HS in the late 50s-early 60s I had a wind-up “Baby Ben” whose alarm was so loud and jarring that I placed it across the room on my desk so I would have to get out of bed to shut it off. Got so I would automatically wake up just seconds PRIOR to the alarm setting, Iand would–in one single fell swoop–throw the covers off, leap out of bed, traverse the room in a single stride and punch the off button rather than endure the sound. Worked great on cold winter mornings! Once you were up, you were up.
My worst clock radio experiences: 1) Waking to “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Whether you’re a fan of Wagner or of Warner Bros. cartoons, that one will get you. 2) Waking to hear a news item that my bank had just failed (this was in the ’80’s when such things were less common).
Both Snooze and Sleep are inventions of the devil.
Cats are not reliable; some days Ingrid decides she wishes to be fed before the alarm is set to go off and other days she’s happy to start the day by snoozing away.
I bought a clock with a loud and unpleasant buzz and put it across the bedroom so I have to get up to turn it off and by that time I can usually convince myself to stay on my feet.
When I was in college and living in a single, I placed the clock radio all the way across the room and had it go off with both the buzzer and the radio at the same time. It didn’t matter. Either I would get up and hit the snooze alarm and then walk back to bed, or I would lie there drifting in and out of sleep as the subsequent alarms went off. People who lived way down the hall would be able to hear my alarm when they walked into the hallway on their way to the bathroom.
Now that I have two dogs, I find that they usually keep me from oversleeping, as one of them usually wanders over to greet me every time the alarm goes off and he hears me moving in my bed. He’s not completely reliable in the winter months, but unfortunately, he’s all too reliable after the sun comes up on weekend mornings when I’m trying to sleep in.
Nevertheless, I do not think I would care for the clocky at all. It would put me in a very bad mood, I suspect.
I turn my kitchen timer on to 7-8 hours. That way, if I sleep through my alarm clock, I wake up for the timer because I’m afraid of something BURNING (it’s a cooking thing).
I can sleep through almost any alarm. I once slept through a tornado, dreaming that there was a war going on. A similar thing happened during an ice storm when limbs were falling on my roof.
I have dreamed that I got up, got dressed, and went to work.
The only thing that is guaranteed to get me up at a specific time is another human with a glass of ice water and an evil bent to his/her personality.
Unless… it’s a baby crying. My daughter, knowing my sleep habits, was just amazed that I got up with her every time my newborn granddaughter cried.
I got a clocky for christmas, because my sister thougth it was fun. All that happened is that I was awake but started the day pissed off every day. the thing would wheel under the bed, get stuck and sit there until I got the broom to get it out, meanwhile my husband who get’s up way later than me, was wide awake too and just as pissed off.
now i got myself one of those fancy sleep cycle alarm clocks which works like a charm. i get up much easier and don’t wake anybody else.
it’s this one I have: http://www.axbo.com/axbo/CMS/CMS.aspx?ClientID=wff1b458fa-9a3b-4f16-9b39-b1d708c62e06&SiteID=0&GroupID=8&Language=E