Alarm Clock
- Dev Team
- 12 Mar 2015
Recently, early in the morning, my wife’s alarm clock went off, triggering a loud burst of Y108 FM. I woke up to the singer for AC/DC shrieking, “Yeah, you! Shook me all! Night! Long!” Then my wife did something to silence the alarm. I sighed and rolled over, eyes still shut. She got up and went out, to the bathroom. I slipped back into sleep … until I was dragged awake by a BOOP-BOOP-BOOP sound.
It was my wife’s alarm clock again, no longer set to music. The beeping sound was so harsh and annoying. I reached across her side of the
bed to grab her alarm clock and pull it towards me. I looked at the top of it. There were lots of buttons. It was beeping really loud. How to shut it up? At first, I couldn’t read the tiny engravings on the buttons, so I started hitting buttons at random. I slid a couple of little multiple-choice switches back and forth. I peered closely at the top of the thing, seeing engraved phrases like “time” and “alarm A” and “alarm B” and “ZZZ” and “on/off ” and “wake 1” and “wake 2” and “set” and “hour” and “minute” and “clock” and pictures of a key and a key-hole and the fast-forward symbol and the rewind symbol and a picture of an analog clock and some other symbols that were about as meaningful as early Egyptian hieroglyphics. Military helicopters have simpler controls — and a less annoying sound.
The endless beeping was driving me mad! Mad, I say!
I grabbed the clock’s cord and pulled at it, gently. Nothing happened, so I quietly swore and gave another pull, harder. Still nothing. I thought of getting out of bed and going to the wall-socket and pulling out the plug properly. I was well aware that yanking on the cord too hard might bend or break the plug’s metal prongs. But I didn’t want to get out of the warm bed and was kind of annoyed at the alarm clock, so I gave the cord my strongest, most violent yank. The plug popped out and the wire shot from the wall at me, like an Indonesian gliding-snake, landing on the bed. I turned over and tried to go back to sleep.
A few minutes later, my wife’s clock started BOOP-BOOP-BOOPing again! I got out of bed and went to the bathroom door and knocked.
“Yes?”
“The alarm clock keeps going and I can’t figure out how to stop it.”
“Oh! Sorry!”
She came out and hurried to our room and performed some brief ritual with the infernal device. I was too far away to see exactly what. The hideous racket stopped.
I said, “How could it beep with the plug pulled out? Is it possessed?”
“It has a battery.”
She flipped the clock over. I saw, embossed in black plastic on the black plastic base, the shape of a 9-volt battery, with little “+” and “-” symbols.
“Oh. Battery.”
My wife finished getting ready and left for work. The kids were all still asleep and I thought of going back to bed to try to sleep too, but I was too pumped up from my battle with the alarm clock. So I got dressed and started my day. A short time later, I was in the bathroom, reading an early draft of my next book, Weed World.
There was a knock on the door.
“Yes?”
My oldest son’s voice said, “There’s a beeping noise coming from your room.”
Without thinking, I said, “Well, go turn off mom’s alarm clock.”
Through the door, I heard his footsteps going away. Before I’d even finished a paragraph, the footsteps returned.
“It won’t turn off.”
“I’ll be right there.”
I put the manuscript by the sink and went to deal with the crisis.
When I got to the clock, the BOOP-BOOP-BOOP had a mocking tone, like a schoolyard brat going, “Nyah, nyah, nyah!”
So I flipped it over, slid back the slot and tried to yank out the rectangular battery. It came out, but not far; it was firmly attached to a plastic-covered little plug attached to a pair of black-and-red wires. I thought of yanking hard, breaking the wires. In my annoyance, I probably would have done so if my son hadn’t been standing right there. I didn’t want to set a bad example, so I took the time to care- fully pull the “-” and “+” terminals away from the clock’s internal tentacle … finally silencing it, mid-BOO—
My son and I stared down at the blank-faced, eviscerated Sony robot on the bed. We were sort of like the last characters in a horror movie, wondering if the killer was really dead this time.
Just in case this ever happens again, I asked my wife to write out the instructions for silencing her alarm clock. We stuck the hand-written notes to the wall by her side of the bed. The document is two pages long, plus footnotes and index.
For simplicity, I suggested that we buy a backyard rooster and wake up to its cock-a-doodle-doo every day. But my wife rejected that idea; apparently, Hamilton has a by-law against chickens in the back yard.
So, we’re stuck with the Sony.
I’m just grateful that my wife doesn’t have an iPhone, which has a wake-up app called Siri that talks in a refined female voice. At wake-up time, Siri would say my wife’s first name, then, “It is now time to wake up,” over and over.
Siri can understand English and recognize individual voices. If my wife wasn’t around to turn her off, Siri’s babbling would be more annoying than Y108 or BOOP-BOOP-BOOP.
If I ever woke to Siri’s babbling, I might get annoyed and say something rude, to which Siri might respond with, “Mark, your abusive comments have been reported to Apple’s anti-harassment department.
Still half asleep, I’d mumble, “Well, I’m not going to apologize, you ****ing piece of ****ing plastic.”
Siri: “Mark, that statement is both false and hurtful.” Me: “Siri, go **** yourself.”
The iPhone would keep on complaining until I broke down and said sorry. If it did not accept my apology at first, I might have to soothe Siri’s feelings by wiping the phone’s screen or treating it to a battery charge.
Compared to that, the Sony clock is not so bad after all.
Comments 0
There are no comments
Add comment