Too clever for our own good

I recently got this alarm clock. My mom got it for me for my birthday to replace the one I got at a drugstore in Oxford that I really liked and therefore broke. I think it actually got broken from one too many half-asleep "What the hell is that noise make it stop make it stop make it stop slap slap crap" as I knocked it off the bookcase next to my lofted bed. Neither here nor there. What I liked about it was that it started with a series of single soft beeps, and gradually doubled the number of beeps at a time until it got to continuous beeping. See, the makers of that one realized that the longer the thing goes off, the more imperative it is that the subject be woken.

Not so my new one. It goes off at the initially set time, even with a similar beeping pattern. If you hit snooze, it goes off five minutes later. If you hit snooze then, it goes off five minutes later. If you hit snooze then, it's done for the morning. Yep, you got your three alarms. If you're not up now, it's content to let you screw yourself out of a job. I can imagine reasons someone would make it that way, but no good reasons. "Now, if you leave it set when you're not there, you won't piss off your family/roommates," or "This way the batteries will last longer even if your employment doesn't," or "Dumbass Alarms: you want to snooze? We let you snooze."

So far I've only been screwed a few times. You know that feeling you get when you were supposed to have woken up to an alarm when it was dark outside, and instead you wake up after a dream finishes and there's just enough hint of light outside to give you that sinking feeling? Yeah. I don't like it either.