Thank You, Battery Back-Up

I got a cool new gadget last week - a digital alarm clock that has two spots to dock iPods - old style and the current iTouch or iPhone. Well when I saw it in the catalog I knew I had to have it. How cool would it be to wake up to a song that I have on my iPod? Plus, it was on sale for half off, so I just had to buy it. I plugged it in yesterday morning and got it all set up, and made sure that I had the alarm set correctly for 6:50 a.m. so I wouldn't be late for work.

As I was going to sleep last night, I noticed something about the new clock. The digital numbers were so bright that they lit up the whole room. It was like I had a night light turned on. I just went on to sleep, and decided I'd change the brightness setting on it the morning.

So I'm sleeping and all of a sudden I wake up to the sound of the alarm beeping. I looked at the very bright numbers and saw that it was only 6:30. I knew that I set the alarm for 6:50, so I couldn't figure out why the alarm was going off 20 minutes early. Anyhoo, I was flailing around trying to hit the "off" button to turn the annoying beeping off and it just kept on beeping. I just have pressed the "off" button a dozen times to no avail. The first thing I thought of was this piece of crap was going to be returned today. Then my sense of hearing must have woke up because I noticed the beeping was coming from the bedroom floor beside my bed. The beeping was coming from my old digital alarm clock. Even though it was unplugged, the batteries for the back-up were still in it and by golly the alarm was still working just fine. By this point I was just fed up and yanked open the battery slot and pulled out a battery just to shut the thing up.

In the few years I had the old alarm clock, our electricity had never gone off during the night. But if it had, I feel pretty confident that the battery back-up on the clock would have woke me up. Just like it did this morning.