I didn’t actually smash the old clock radio, but put it on a shelf in another room because one never knows when one might need another $19 clock radio that one hates. The new clock radio sets itself, so Friday afternoon I took just a perfunctory trip through the owner’s manual to be sure I set the alarm time correctly. This one is much simpler, with the buttons placed in areas less likely to be mistakenly pressed, thus it is less likely to induce a series of temper tantrums at 4:00 AM. I pressed the button that indicates which days the alarm is set to go off, a handy feature, and it appeared that it was set for weekdays, a sensible option.
Saturday morning, a few minutes before 4:30, we were awakened to a loud beeping noise. Any number of devices in the house are capable of beeping (and anything capable of making any sort of electronic sound is necessarily within my purview), so it took a minute to figure out that it was the old alarm clock, with its cord wound around it, stuffed on a shelf in a different room, and that some idiot had obviously failed to remove the batteries, again. I never would have guessed sound could have traveled so effectively from a different room with a closed door. We both got up because Captain OCD didn’t know where I had put it and I’m not overly articulate at that hour of the morning after being woken suddenly and unexpectedly. Or after being woken in any manner at all, at any time. He finally found it and attempted, without his glasses, to figure out how to get the batteries out while I got back in bed. Finally, the beeping stopped and I hoped that I’d be able to get back to sleep.
A few minutes later Captain OCD came back in the bedroom and found me laughing, crawling over his side of the bed. The same idiot who had forgotten to take the batteries out of the old clock had misinterpreted the instructions she hadn’t read and the new alarm was set to go off all seven days of the week. At 4:30 AM.
