Why I am calling time on phone alarms

Sorry to say, it’s not to take emergency calls — the ringer’s off; these days I mostly turn on the sound for Instagram. I just like to, you know, check my stuff: last thing before bed, first thing in the morning and upon every overnight flash of wakefulness.

Are my European friends digging that post? Did the Dodgers win? What’s the opposite of “intransigent”?

And of course, when I need to wake up before my natural circadian surfacing (which is before my neighbour’s dogs but after those stupid birds), I use the phone alarm. But usually, out of habit, caution or loyalty, I also set my clock radio.

That’s right — my clock radio! It’s a clock and it’s a radio, and that’s it! Waking up to the radio is a flat-out superior experience to my phone’s alarm on many levels.

It’s not that the phone alarms themselves are dreadful; my chosen chime, which has the groovy yacht-rock name ‘Slow Rise’, is a pleasant enough melody.

I might prefer the fluttering keyboards from Ween’s ‘The Mollusk’, but eventually, any chime becomes just a chime, which presents two issues.

First, you might build a tolerance and fail to notice you’re being summoned to rise, whether slowly or otherwise. More crucial, waking up to a standardised sound is a boring way to live.

It’s almost too obvious to point out, but the radio, by contrast, is different at every moment, forever. So on any given morning, a clock radio may give you any variety of human voices, or Beethoven’s Sixth, or ‘Baba O’Riley’.

Sometimes you wake up to a marvellous serendipity, like a plane song on the morning of a flight.

How many people have woken up to ‘I Got You Babe’ and just cracked up? (If I ran an oldies station, we would play that song at the same time every morning.) But the radio won’t jolt you — if you want a mellow break with slumber, you set your radio to a public news or classical station; if you dig guitar solos, you set it to classic rock.

We take the radio’s blend of predictability and surprise as a given, though such formatting was invented by programmers in the ’60s because they recognised that this formula gives us cognitive, even visceral pleasure.

A phone alarm is pinched and paltry — it merely says, “Hey, it’s that time.”

Whereas radio, coming from somewhere else through the freaking air, is a portal to the living world, and an invitation to rejoin it. After all, some of your fellow citizens — bakers, truckers, nurses — are up already and hearing that same sound at the same time as you while they go about their business. Maybe they’re even talking about what’s on or singing along to a shared favourite. I believe that when we hear the radio, we intuit this social activity on some level, and that it’s compelling and subliminally motivating, if not slightly shaming — sometimes it takes a village to raise a child. That is, to raise a grown child. From bed.

By now, the luckiest among you are gazing fondly at your own clock radio, and many more of you are  remembering one.

They’re all pretty similar, but each has its own idiosyncrasies and talents.

Mine’s a 1982 General Electric and in tiny letters above the time, it proudly, sweetly touts its ‘Forward-reverse time set’ feature — so quaint at this remove, but boy, what a joy it was in 1982 to fall back one hour rather than spring ahead 23.

At reveille, it reveals a subtle benefit: It makes a petite pop when the radio comes on, not at all startling, just enough to get my subconscious attention.

But its truly special gift is holding its breath during brief electrical outages. Not forever, but if the lights come back on after 10 or even 15 seconds, it returns with the correct time, unblinking — unlike my microwave clock and stove clock, those helpless, annoying twins.

It also has green numbers, a charming variation on the usual angry red — and if they’re too bright, there’s a dimmer knob in the back.

All the switches are a utilitarian dream — each is simple and essential, and they’re chunky enough that not only can I find them in the dark but I can operate them with my bare feet.

And I actually do, because the clock sits on the floor, snugly under a small blond-wood bookcase, humble and devoted. I don’t feel bad for the floor thing, the feet thing — it must know I love it; I’ve kept it through every possession purge I’ve ever made.

There was one close call: the Great Burglary of 1998, when thieves made off with all my stuff, including my laptop, stereo and laundry basket (which I imagine was useful for carrying off all my stuff). Miraculously, or out of foolish disregard, they left behind the clock radio.

I can’t imagine the laptop exists in any recognisable state today, but the clock radio still works perfectly, sharing my most personal space, as it has continuously since ‘Ebony and Ivory’, since ‘Jack and Diane’.

We have moved together dozens of times. And traditionally, the very first thing I do in the new place is plug in the clock radio.

As I unpack, I imagine my other things emerging from their boxes, hearing the tinny music, seeing the green numbers.

And they realise: We’re home again.