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kleinbl00  ·  2017 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Letter of Recommendation: Clock Radios

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.