The Glory and Detriment of Alarms and the Snooze Button

This morning, as with many mornings, I awoke to my cell phone midi tone "Coconuts", the most diabolical of all tunes. As this is the official wake-me-up tone, I now cringe and have urges to smash my crap phone when I hear it in public. It made me think of two things - 1. What has happened to the advancement of the alarm clock, 2. How awful it is when tunes get stuck in association to bad things (more on that tomorrow)

NATURE
My life with alarms started when I was a kid. I grew up with a chicken coop in Miami; not at all  normal. The morning wake-up call was our rooster, who had one eye and one leg (like teddy roosevelt's), due to an unfortunate act with a possum, but he woke up everything and everyone in the whole neighborhood.

URGENCY
When we got rid of the chickens I got my first alarm clock, Mickey Mouse, which still works to this very day but which only goes off once in the morning and you either got up or missed the breakfast. The need to get to school out-weighed the desire to go back to sleep. 

SLEEP DEBT
When I went to college I moved on to my first digital clock with a snooze button. The snooze button and I have a truly beautiful love hate relationship. I love that it lets me go back to sleep and it hates me enough to not wake me up. I was late to my share of college classes. I then moved onto setting my cell phone as an alarm. This too had a snooze button which became as useless as the digital clock's. So I went to adding the two together at different time implements but eventually my brain compensated even for that - so I added my Mickey clock back into the mix as a last resort (at this point you must understand I was in my first year of college and when I did sleep, I slept).  

SLEEP INERTIA
The three-pronged approach worked for a bit but it never stuck, it lacked Wakeupability (for lack of a better word) and I have an even harder time getting up today. As the stresses of life pile up, more people are prone to this sleep inertia, which is just a fancy term for the grogginess in the morning I have that makes it so hard to wake up. 

It seems that the new clocks have taken the approach of attacking the cause of insuring wake-up (sleep inertia, urgency, nature, sleep debt). Clocky rolls away from you and forces you out of bed, which I think is ingenious but I do not have the space in the room to let it roll. Then there are the "peaceful progressives", which use simulated sunlight to wake you up, and there are ones with aromatherapy. For a really high-tech alarm clock you could use a sleep monitor like the ones at Axon Labs, which promise to reduce the sleep inertia by waking you up when you are less vulnerable to it. 

To me the best approach would be to combine them all into a brightly shining screaming rooster clock which runs around your room frantically and repeats this act every 5 minutes with no snooze button. TADA! 

I already feel bad for my cat...but seriously, the importance of getting up in the morning should weigh heavier on the creation of better alarms. I would love to see something that could wake me up with a positive morning. Let's get on this people.