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Four-Minute Snooze
About a year ago, I replaced my fifteen year old, Emerson clock radio with the blown speaker with a new, cheapie Target special model. Now, this clock does exactly what it’s supposed to, no more, no less. It keeps time and it beeps loudly at a preset time every morning.
In my many years of experience, I’ve come to find that the standard snooze time for an alarm clock is either 5 or 9 minutes. (I’m a big proponent of the 9-minute snooze, myself, though, that may just be habitual from my time with the Emerson clock radio.) My new alarm clock, however, has a bizarre snooze length of only 4 minutes.
Besides being too short to be a snooze of any real value, the 4-minute snooze has another serious drawback that I have discovered lately. Any individual 4-minute snooze won’t really have a material effect on when I make it to work. That is to say, if I wake at 7:59 as opposed to 7:55, it really won’t make a difference. The problem comes when daisy-chaining this logic of indifference through a number of snoozes, it’s terribly easy to go from 7:55 to 8:23. And among those snoozes, there was no specific instance that could be identified as the snooze that made me late. But I find myself running late (again!) all the same.
4.6.07 | 10am | 3 Comments