Alarm clock

I’ve had the same alarm clock for about 16 years. It is an old Audiologic alarm that I got for Christmas sometime in middle school, because it had this weird “natural sounds function.” You could set it so that it played “waves” or “rain” or “wind.” Actually, it’s all just various tones of static that don’t really sound like anything.

But I still kept it. It worked well for me. I got so that I could set it, change settings, make adjustments, without even looking at it. I knew all the keys on it like a piano.

My favorite design element of the alarm is its controls up top. They are all under this plastic flap. To reach them, you flip the flap up. The flap itself doesn’t click in place, though. It simply rests atop the other alarm controls. The purpose of this is ingenius. The flap has a leg on it so that it rests mainly atop the snooze button. In other words, when you are in bed in the morning and the alarm goes off and you just want to hit snooze, all you have to do is slap the top of the alarm, pretty much anywhere, and you will have hit snooze. You don’t have to hunt for the specific button at all.

Come to think of it, this might be a bad thing and part of the reason why I am such a snooze button addict and terminally late to work. I don’t know.

The alarm no longer sets well and the radio functions on it are basically impossible. It still has the most piercing morning buzz of any similar machine I’ve ever heard, though. I can’t imagine anything else waking me so effectively. I may have to hunt for a new alarm clock soon, and that’s unfortunate.