I can’t tell you how long it’s been since we’ve bought a new alarm clock in the Peterson household, but it’s been awhile.
The old one we brought with us when we moved here nearly 12 years ago. It had the standard features of the backup battery, digital display, AM/FM radio which we never used, and the two features we like the best —the two alarm time settings and the automatic adjusting for the time change in the spring and fall.
Just to give you another idea as to how long the alarm clock sat on our nightstand, it started before Congress for some reason decided to move the start and ending dates for daylight saving time ahead by two weeks. Our alarm clock never adjusted for the change, and twice a year we would be off by an hour until we realized we got out of bed an hour early in the spring and of course the reverse in the fall.
Where our clock failed us in the end was that the digital display didn’t resemble numbers anymore.
The funny thing here is the one feature never used was the alarm itself. We set it every night only to turn it off before it buzzed in the morning.
Here’s a random thought — if you were to ever name your alarm clock, Buzz would be an appropriate name.
So it was off to buy a new alarm clock. There we stood in front of the selection of alarm clocks. We quickly disqualified the wind-up and battery-operated ones.
What we wanted was one with two alarm setting times — which we never planned to use — and one that would reset itself to the correct time twice a year on the correct dates.
Other bells and whistles didn’t really matter. To my surprise, the two-alarm setting wasn’t available. I quickly came to realize if we really didn’t use the first alarm, there wasn’t much use for a second one.
It seems the latest features for the alarm have to do with your cellphone. Most new alarm clocks come with one or more ports for plugging in your phone or MPS3 player.
I did like the charging feature on the alarm clock, but as is the norm in my world, I couldn’t find one that had the automatic resetting of the time for the twice-a-year time change and also came with the cellphone charge port.
That said, we now have a new alarm clock that displays numbers that look like numbers, and it resets itself twice a year. No radio, no dual alarm, no cellphone charge port, just a plain old alarm clock.
Boy, I hope the electricity doesn’t go out — maybe we should have gotten a wind-up one or at least one with a battery backup. Oh well, tick tock.