What's the point!?
I got woken up by my new alarm this morning. Hoorah. Not quite. You see, I was woken up by the doorbell going and the postman delivering the alarm, which I'd bought online for a modest sum.

I was still excited. I'm terrible at waking up. I thought that a small travel alarm might have, in its tinny beepy nasty way, the ability to irritate my brain into wakefulness. Two hours of radio 2 at stupid volumes seems to fail, so perhaps a small device would burrow into my consciousness. The alarm is made by Westclox, who are long-standing veterans of the clock world. I had high hopes.

The clock is lovely - a nice LCD with bendy numbers. It was also really obvious how to set it and set the time. I was pleased with it. It's also a lovely shape and seems to be tough enough to outlast my gigging schedule. I set the time and set the alarm to go off a minute later.

It went off. Then it went off. The second "went off" means that the alarm beeped at me for a minute and then shut up - for good. What's the point!? The alarm comes with a snooze button which will let you postpone the alarm call - up to a maximum of 4 times. What's the point of that? I want an alarm that nags me persistently until I get out of bed. If I snooze it, I want it to come back with a vengeance the next time. I don't want a radio alarm clock which only runs two hours - it takes more than that to wake me. I don't want an alarm that cuts out after a minute so as not to disturb anybody. I'm a bleeding corpse of a morning. I'm getting virtually no sleep. I need something to gnaw into my consciousness and help me get the motivation to get the hell out of bed.

Still, the numbers were a nice shape.

A minute.

For ****'s sake!