We all know the feeling:
Immersed in a perfectly good dream, the voices of classic
rock disc jockeys invade your
subconscious. No matter what time an alarm is set for, it always comes on a few minutes too soon. Thankfully, one of the greatest
innovations ever is usually within arm’s reach of the bed: the snooze button, a procrastinator’s favorite way to start the day.
According to USA TODAY,
40 percent of American adults
use the snooze button every
morning, with one-third of those late sleepers pushing it three or more times.
While the earliest American alarm clocks date back to the 1850s, sleep-deprived citizens would have to wait until 1956 for General Electric to introduce
the first snooze feature. In the days prior to digital alarms, the snooze button was made possible by
incorporating a new gear into the mechanics. The arbitrary alignment of this new mechanism and the pre-existing cogs left manufacturers with two options: either set the snooze feature for nine or
10 minutes. GE decided it would be easier to market a more punctual alarm that kept you in bed for less than 10 minutes. When digital alarms replaced the mechanical clock, the nine-minute standard carried over.
“People set their alarms for when they would want to get up and give themselves a little bit of extra time. Ten minutes would make most people late for work,” said Allen Davis, service manager at Creative Clock in Eugene.
Nowadays, there’s an alarm
for everybody’s needs. Snooze
features come in a variety of time increments, though the 10-minute snooze is still a rarity. Creative Clock carries more than
100 different alarms and is the only
antique clock museum on the
West Coast. On the hour, chimes
of all timbres simultaneously fill the small shop.
“We don’t even hear them,” Jeannie Innocenti, a Creative Clock salesperson, said. “It’s like living by the railroad tracks. After a while you don’t notice the trains.”
While Creative Clock houses
an impressive collection of
German cuckoos and historical relics, most customers arrive
in search of something to help them get out of bed.
“Students come in looking for the loudest, most obnoxious alarm clock,” Innocenti said.
Creative Clock has every type of shrill alarm imaginable, including a pink hula-hoop hippopotamus,
a Jeep with spinning tires and a Dalmatian in a firefighter’s helmet that barks “I love you.”
“If that’s your alarm clock, you know to wake up before it goes off,” Innocenti said.
Interestingly enough, few of the employees at Creative Clock even use an alarm.
“I found that when I set
an alarm, I’d always wake up just before it went off,” Innocenti said.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, college students
get an average of 6.8 hours of sleep each night, two hours less than recommended for optimal mental performance. A simple way to get out of bed in the morning
is to open the blinds and let
the sun shine into the bedroom.
Sunlight halts the body’s production of melatonin, a chemical that induces sleepiness. While this might not be enough to kick the snooze habit, it should get
students to class on time.

Brian R. Burke is a freelance reporter for the Daily Emerald