An Alarming Blog

One of CyberDave’s recent blogs recounted his battles with an alarm clock he used when he was a lad delivering the morning paper. When I was a lad I, too, delivered the morning paper. Didn’t I blog about that? Sure I did: read How I Learned To Drive. And I, too, had an alarm clock. It was a Big Ben windup clock. It was made in the day when clocks went tick-tock-tick-tock and alarms went brrrriiiinnnng! And its alarm was loud and robust. It was exactly what was needed to get a 14 year old lad up and going to work at 4 AM every morning.

But I adapted to it. I learned to shut off that alarm without waking up. Oh, yeah – I wanted to sleep. So to wake myself I had to place the alarm clock directly under the center of my bed. Then, I could no longer reach over and shut it off in my sleep. When the alarm went off, I had to get out of bed and crawl under the bed to reach the alarm clock. Eventually, I adapted to that, too. I learned to get out of bed, crawl under the bed, shut off the alarm, and get back in bed – all without waking up. I don’t recall my brother cursing me from across the room. Of course, he may have – I was asleep, though.

Eventually, I went off to college. One summer I got a job in Bladensburg, Maryland. I found a cheap place to stay in College Park, on the campus of the University of Maryland. The fraternity houses were mostly empty during the summer and rooms could be rented cheaply: just eight dollars a week. There was no electricity and no hot water, but that was ok. I was trying to save every penny for college tuition.

I said the frat houses were “mostly empty.” There were some frat guys in the house taking summer classes, and I was warned not to leave anything lying around in the open or they would steal it. So I kept everything locked up in a steamer trunk. Everything except for one item: my alarm clock. It was a cheap plastic clock for which I had paid the retail price of one dollar. The alarm sounded like plastic gears grinding together. I left it sitting out next to my trunk. Apparently, the idea of owning a one dollar plastic clock was too enticing for someone, and one day it was stolen. The theft was a minor annoyance. Mostly, it spoke volumes to me about the character of some frat boys on that campus. I mean, if you’re going to throw away your integrity by turning yourself into a thief, is a one dollar plastic clock your price? Really? To know your integrity is worth so little seems a sad thing to know about oneself.

Recently, I needed an “hour-meter”. That’s a gadget that, when electricity is supplied, begins running and counting time, and when electricity is removed it retains the time until it’s powered up again. They’re often used by industry. (And back in the day, when I took flying lessons in a single-engine Cessna, there was a Hobbs meter on the instrument panel to record how many hours were on the engine.) I decided the cheap way to count hours would be to attach an electric clock to the circuit I wanted to monitor. It only counts to 12 hours, so I would have to log the time periodically, but that was ok. I went to the store looking to buy an electric clock that could run on household AC. I guess I’m a fossil because it seems no one makes anything like that any longer. All the clocks I found were battery-powered, micro-chippy affairs. And when unpowered they lost whatever time they had counted.

The days when clocks went tick-tock and alarms went brrrriiiinnnng! are in the dead past now, along with rotary dial phones, TVs with 12 channels, and 15-cent hamburgers.