- A phone alarm is pinched and paltry — it merely says, “Hey, it’s that time. ... ” Whereas radio, coming from somewhere else through the freaking air, is a portal to the living world, and an invitation to rejoin it. After all, some of your fellow citizens — bakers, truckers, nurses — are up already and hearing that same sound at the same time as you while they go about their business. Maybe they’re even talking about what’s on or singing along to a shared favorite. I believe that when we hear the radio, we intuit this social activity on some level, and that it’s compelling and subliminally motivating, if not slightly shaming — sometimes it takes a village to raise a child. That is, to raise a grown child. From bed.
Last week, I acquired a Tivoli System Three open box for $105. This will be the third Tivoli product I've purchased; we use their radios as client sound systems at the birth center and they sound dope. This particular gadget is fully capable of Alarm Overkill: bluetooth will stay on forever. And it has an alarm. So to see how the alarm worked, I set an alarm, forgot to turn off bluetooth, and then used my phone as backup. So at 4:45 am, my phone woke me up, transmitted its wakeup chimes to the clock radio, and then the clock radio started its own beeping. It would have happily done FM or AM as well but as it was the cacophony was something nobody could sleep through. Which is good because in college I used a clock radio set to the radio station I supported... which was also run out of a high school, whose transmitter would occasionally... crap out. So having mixed Corrosion of Conformity until 4am, when my clock radio dutifully turned on at 6:30am and broadcast a gentle Brownian hum I slept clear through it until 8:30. My fluid mechanics final was from 7 until 9. So my then-girlfriend blitzed me to college, dropped me off in front of the building and I rushed in at 8:50. My TA took pity on me and gave me an extra 5 minutes, thereby allowing me to take the 2-hour 300-level fluid mechanics final in 15 minutes. I got an 89, thereby cementing my legend amongst the mechanical engineering students for many quarters (probably a better score than I would have gotten if I had 2 hours; I do well under pressure). But that snafu, on top of another crisis three years previous whereby I slept through the alarm set to get a visiting Womanbeast on a plane home in order to secure my freedom and thereby requiring a $700 ticket to get the she-thing out of my house, have made it so that I now awake approximately 15 minutes before any alarm I set. No, there is no point to these stories other than to share my fraught but affectionate relationship with clock radios.
You know, I've only had a clock radio as a kid. I remember setting the alarm at random times to enjoy the sound of it during breaks while studying and such. I also had a radio with an antenna and a wire that I would move around the room. I was facinated to find out where in the air I could find the right pristine sound of a station. Sometimes it was only a slight shift between stations.