Orkut Amusement

I've joined some pretty funny Orkut communities. One of them is Oversleepers Anonymous, where people discuss topics such as:

* least effective alarms
* The most comfortable bed?
* How long have you slept today?
* the irony of it all
* Tips for getting up/being woken up
* When was the last time you overslept?
* snooze button: best ever invention?
* The snooze record
* Ten more minutes

Some of these are absolutely hilarious! I thought I was pretty bad for sleeping in, until I read some of the oversleeping exploits of this bunch. You want to know what some of the sleeping records are? Quite a few are over 24 hours. See, it's not just me. And I am not the only person who uses my mobile phone as an alarm clock, in addition to the screeching alarm clock, and the portable one I got at MOMA in NYC that is now residing in the bathroom to remind me what time it is.

I think my favourite thread is Tips for getting up/being woken up. There's this German guy from Hamburg who got his hands on this huge factory bell from the 1950s made of cast iron, used to signal lunchtime for the workers. He hooked up a digital clock-controlled relay that switches the bell on after his two other alarm clocks. He says it helps him get out of bed, because he's scared the the big bell will start ringing:

"I can't use it often, because the whole house wakes up and sometimes i keep sleeping for more then 2 hours while its ringing, then even the neighbours will start complaining."

This one guy in Belgium wrote a script to start playing some song at volume 0 and progressively increase it to 100 over a period of six minutes. It worked for three days, he said. Hmmm... I'd really get in trouble for that one. Christa used to come in and turn off my alarm clock herself because it would wake her up and not me, even though it was beside my head and she was way over in the far end of the living room. I can't imagine what Volume 100 would evoke, probably a contract on my head.

Here's a thread from Least Effective Alarms:

Mobile Alarm clock -- from the UK
Did anyone here the story/joke about the alarm clock which was part toy car, part alarm clock. The way I heard it was that when it went off it started moving and started making a siren like noise. Think I remember someone telling me about chasing one around. Then again I may have been drinking when I heard the story so I may have imagined that part.

motorized ball! -- from Norway
That's a brilliant idea! My brother has a dust collecting robot, that is really nothing but a motorized ball driving a cloth. Remove the cloth and have a siren in it... you'd have to chase it. Or maybe you'd just become a skilled marksman, throwing stuff at it.

-- from an American, in Canada
For a while I tried setting my alarm to my favorite radio station with the volume set pretty loud, but that usually didn't work. However, one morning I woke up all freaked out because a stranger was in my room, yelling [at] me. I'd accidentally moved the tuner to a talk radio station and the host was ranting and raging about something at the moment when my alarm went off. It was effective, for a while.