I’ve had the same alarm clock for quite a while now. I got it for Christmas a few years ago, so the first time I used it, it was in the middle of winter. That little nugget of information will be important to remember a little later on.
I wanted this particular alarm because it is supposed to ease you gently into the waking world. It has a light that slowly gets brighter, until your bedroom is bathed in a morning-like glow. It’s some sort of Voodoo-Zen, touchy-feely thing that has to do with Circadian rhythms or something like that. In plain English, it means it’s supposed to wake you up the way the sun does, which is supposed to be more natural and healthy.
I didn’t really care about that. I just wanted an alarm clock that would wake me up gently. I was using the alarm on my phone, which rattles the shingles off the roof when it goes off. It sounds like a tornado siren, but instead of being a half-mile away, it’s four inches from my left ear when it goes off in the mornings. I was getting tired of shooting vertically out of bed every day. I’ve pretty much destroyed the ceiling fan over the bed – not to mention the damage that thing does to me this time of year, when we turn it on before we go to bed.
But the new alarm clock was supposed to fix that. And it did for a couple of weeks. But then I got used to the light, so I had to turn on the sound, too. The sound alarm on that clock also starts out quiet, and gradually gets louder.
The problem is, it’s a bird call. It might have worked if it were a duck or goose – especially on mornings I’m getting up early to go hunting. But the morons who built that clock decided to use a robin’s call, instead. Now I’ll wake up to robins chirping at 3 in the morning, but I’ll sleep right through that stupid alarm at 5, when I should be getting up. So it’s back to the phone claxon. Now I need to get a new ceiling fan.
