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The Snooze button - Why?
Saturday 24 January 2009
I have had cause to wonder 
recently why the snooze button goes off every nine minutes. Not in any existential philosophic way, as in Why does a snooze button exist, and why does it go off and if a snooze button goes off in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound (perhaps not if it is one of the alarm clocks below), but in a more practical way, why nine minutes? 
While the various people I have asked, and the various websites I have perused have suggested that it has something to do with only needing to keep track of one number (that is, if you snooze at 6:00am, then when the last number reaches 9 it will go off, or for example 6:24, when the last number reaches 3 again, it will go off). Perhaps this is the appendix of all alarm clocks, but in this day and age I would have thought alarm clock manufacturers could set it at any length of time they wanted (3, 9, 16 or even 60 minutes).
Do others have any suggestions for this anomaly, or even better have an alarm clock with something other than a 9 minute snooze?
3 comments :
No snooze button in Bangladesh. Just a hundred blokes shouting their heads off at 530 from the tops of minarets, a man screaming 'chicken' in Bengali at the top of his voice at 600 and a dog howling from 900 in the evening to 600 in the morning. I'd like a snooze button attached to the chicken man and all his pals.
The nine minutes means that you know you have pushed the snooze button, especially if you set it for say, 6.30am. If it gave you ten minutes, at 6.40am you could easily be mistaken for thinking it is the first time it has gone off.
That said, I have never deliberately used the snooze button.
I can't believe you have never used the snooze button. If I added up all the time I have used it, it would probably be months and months of my life gone because of the snooze button.
Perhaps I should try the screaming Bengali chicken method.
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