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11:53am on Friday, 5th February, 2021:

Unreliable Alarms

Anecdote

I have two portable alarm clocks, neither of which is wholly reliable.

The digital one occasionally switches its alarm on for no good reason. Less frequently, it switches its alarm off for no good reason.

The analogue one ignores the alarm on/off switch. If the alarm went off at 7:30pm then it will also go off at 7:30pm regardless of what the on/off switch says. I have to take the battery out to stop a 7:30am alarm from going off at 7:30pm. It sometimes decides to stop in the middle of the night, which I suspect may be to do with ambient temperature. It's rather relaxed about when it performs: a 7:30am alarm could actually go off any time between 7:25am and 7:40am.

Yesterday, I had to get up at 2:40am to deliver a talk to a class in the USA (7pm in California — the students Zooming in from the East Coast were complaining it was too late). I set both my alarms, in the hope that at least one of them would deign to wake me up. Staggeringly, they both worked. Even more staggeringly, they both went off at the exact same time. I have no idea how that happened — I hadn't even synchronised them to be showing the same time.

I'm sure that all the cool kids use their phones as alarms, but every time I've tried that I've managed to switch off the alarm sound while trying to switch off all the other beeps the phone produces at random moments.

Needless to say, my wife slept through the alarms but woke up when she heard me speak in the distance and never got fully back to sleep until my Zoom call ended.




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