How long does it take for your alarm clock to wake you up? And I'm not talking about when its set to radio mode and maybe you lie there listening to the music for a while. I'm talking about the jail-break, prisoner-escaping, air-raid siren, screech mode. 1 second? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? Maybe a minute if you are made of stone?
The reason I ask is that I happen to live in an apartment building, and this morning, which happens to be a Sunday morning (one of the days that most people happen to sleep in), I was awakened at 7:30 to the sound of an alarm clock. Obviously it was not mine. I thought, maybe it is my roommate's alarm clock, since he is out of town. I got up to go see. Unfortunately it wasn't his. Slowly I realized that it was the alarm clock of our neighbors through the ceiling.
And how long did it happen to keep ringing? For the next hour! Apparently alarm clock manufacturers have decided that if the alarm doesn't wake them up right away, keep trying for the next 60 minutes. Who needs that in an alarm? If that thing doesn't wake you up in the first 5 minutes, you're not getting up. You are a dead body, a deaf person, or someone confined to their bed who will be deaf soon after an hour of that screech.
So two suggestions:
1) If you live in apartments have a little consideration for those who you don't know, but with whom you share a wall. If I owned a shotgun, I would have considered firing it repeatedly at the ceiling in the hopes of somehow stopping the alarm from going, saving the last shell for myself, to put me out of my misery.
2) If you are someone who has a lot of clout in the alarm clock world, suggest that perhaps 10 minutes of screeching be the maximum amount of time before the auto-shutoff.
Thank you and good night.
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