Waking Up When You're on the Road

I firmly believe that if the managers of the employees who invent, build, and sell alarm clocks were forced to use their own products for a week, they would quickly scrap the junk they're selling to the public, and the world’s first "perfect" alarm clock would finally be invented. My wife’s new alarm clock is absolutely ridiculous. There must be 9 separate multi-function switches all over the damn thing. You need three hands, four thumbs, and an impeccable sense of timing to set it; and after you go to bed, you stare at it with a very low level of confidence that it has been set correctly and that it will actually wake you up.

Throughout my travels, I’ve been burnt by so many "wake up" devices:

• Wake-up calls; I’m the one who gets them an hour early, late, or not at all. Remember, a computer may run the wake-up call system, but it’s only as accurate as the information entered into it by the desk clerk that you called to make the request. I stopped asking for wake-up calls when fully half of them starting failing.
• Some in-room hotel alarm clocks require an Ph.D. and a Nobel prize to set them correctly. They beep, or buzz, or they buzz AND beep, or they wake you to the sound of the radio or your iPod. You must set the time and the alarm time, am/pm, and you must turn it on and remember to set the volume. By the time you’ve set all of the appropriate switches, you go to sleep with an element of doubt that you’ve set it correctly or that you’ll ever wake up when/if it goes off.
• My Smartphone; Yes, there’s an alarm feature; but it only seems to work about 9/10 times, and I have to remember to leave the phone on, charged, and NOT on "vibrate."
• The infamous "call from your colleague" rarely works. If you struggle to wake up in the morning, why put pressure on someone else to "call to make sure you're up?" Besides, you know they'll forget...
• Watch alarms; my arm always winds up under a pillow, which snuffs out the beeping sound from my chronograph.

People mock my travel alarm, but a travel alarm clock is of singular purpose. It has one function in life, and that function is very important to people who travel across time zones. It simply needs to make a lot of noise, at the pre-prescribed time, every time, so that you wake up in time for your day. How simple is that?

This clock goes where I go. It "lives" in my dop-kit next to the toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo. I never forget it, and I never forget to place it on my nightstand. It's 2 inches wide, and you can see what time the alarm is set for just by looking at it. When you spin the outer bezel with the time zones on it, it moves the hour-hand to automatically adjust the time for you. When you go to bed, you simply pick your time zone, and you turn on the alarm. As a bonus, it’s made of stainless steel so it drives the TSA fools crazy at the airport (I love to keep them on their toes).

The hands on my travel alarm glow in the dark, but they're small and I’m getting older and my eyes aren’t what they used to be, so I’m considering a switch to the "St. Elmos Fire" model by the Dalvey Company. It has similar features to my current clock, but if you touch the case on this one an "Indiglow" feature lights up the whole clock face.

Here’s a tip for you folks that like to use the hotel alarm, but don’t like the bright beacon-like display that illuminates the room at night. If you slide a knee-high sized panty hose stocking over the clock, it will mute the bright display down to a more subtle presentation that you can still read in the middle of the night without it lighting up the room!

EXTRA: Please feel free to leave comments on this article! If you have questions for Ken regarding business travel, hotels, airplanes, etc, please send him a "Tweet" on his twitter account. You can also follow Ken on Twitter @foodbreeze!