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Alarm clocks
Chris Siebenmann [1] uses iPhone as an alarm clock [2], and his reasons are
largely why I too, I keep my old iPhone (which is no longer supported by the
Oligarchic Cell Phone Company) as an alarm clock (and why I don't have a new
iPhone that is supported is a complicated story I'd rather not get into for
my own sanity).
And I use the iPhone for all the reasons that Chris does. But one aspect that
Chris doesn't mention is the ability to change the alarm sound to prevent
myself from being conditioned to ignore the alarm. I have two stories about
an old alarm clock (of the type that you plug into the wall) that illustrate
my being conditioned to an alarm.
Both of these happened in the mid-90s when I had been using the same alarm
clock for maybe a decade at that point. The first was a dream. I was at work
when my boss approached me. “Baah baah baah baah baah baah,” he said. Nothing
I said deterred him from his speech impediment. “Baah baah baah baah baah
baah.” He just would not shut up. It took a while for me to realize that my
alarm clock was going off, and that I had incorporated the sound into my
dream. “Baah baah baah baah baah baah,” indeed.
For the second, I must explain that I had placed my alarm clock out of arms
reach. In fact, I had placed it across the room, meaning that when I realized
the alarm was going off, I would be forced to get out of bed to shut it off.
But as I found out, that wasn't enougn.
There was one time when the alarm went off, “baah baah baah baah baah baah,”
I would roll out of bed, take the two steps to cross the room, slap the
“snooze” button, two steps back, roll back into bed. “Baah baah baah baah
baah baah.” Roll out of bed, two steps, slap, two steps, back to sleep.
**For three hours!**
At which point, the alarm clock said “enough of this silliness,” and shut the
alarm off itself. I am not proud to have learned this.
So yes, I still use the iPhone for an alarm clock, as when (and I think it's
a matter of when) I become conditioned to the current alarm sound, I can
change it.
But that still leaves one question—why does “snooze” only last for nine
minutes? The most plausible answer is one popular model did it that way [3].
So there you go.
[1] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/
[2] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SmartphoneAlarmClockWhyGood
[3] https://www.slashgear.com/1845969/why-alarm-clock-snooze-nine-minutes/
Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org
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