My boss just blogged about something that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while now: alarm clocks.

Why on earth do alarm clocks have to be so horrible? Surely there must be a really, truly good alarm clock out there, but I have yet to find it. Any alarm clock I’ve ever seen has had at least one, if not most, of the following annoyances:

The clock face uses green LEDs. We bought an alarm clock like this (green numbers on a black background) and quickly returned it. The green LEDs lit the whole bedroom. I shouldn’t be able to see reflected light off the wall from my alarm clock, nor should I see a green glow on the underside of my eyelids if I happen to be facing it. Red LEDs seem to be the trick here (red numbers on a black background), though they’re becoming harder to find. I haven’t tried a green LCD clock face (black numbers on a pale green background), so I can’t speak to that, but it sure seems like it would be too bright.

There are buttons on the top of the alarm clock besides Snooze. If I want to snooze for another nine minutes (why is it always nine, anyway?) the last thing I want to be doing is feeling around on the alarm clock for the Snooze button. My current alarm clock has a Sleep button that feels exactly like the Snooze button, and if I press it, all is lost. The radio stays on, but it is now in Sleep mode, not Alarm mode, and if I press the Snooze button, the radio goes off, but doesn’t come back on in nine minutes. It’s hard to imagine worse behavior. There should be only one button on the top of the alarm clock: a big Snooze button.

The alarm is too hard to turn off. Our alarm clock has a little switch with four modes: off, radio on, radio alarm set, and buzzer alarm set. This makes it a real pain to turn off the alarm in the morning when you wake up. Fortunately I have the (undocumented) Sleep button trick described above, which has the added benefit of leaving the alarm set for the next day.

The current time is too easy to change. Most alarm clocks have a mode that must be set or a button that must be held in order to change the current time (or the alarm time). Believe it or not, our previous alarm clock had buttons on top that unceremoniously changed the time whenever you pressed them. So I’d be fumbling for the Snooze button and accidentally set the clock ahead an hour or two. Very frustrating. Setting the time should not be that easy. (Though it can’t hurt to have a simple switch in the back for Daylight Savings Time.)

The radio reception is terrible. It’s depressing when you can’t wake to your favorite radio station simply because the broadcast station isn’t across the street.

The radio volume control is on the side of the alarm. Many alarm clocks have little dials on the side that change the volume; unfortunately, this means that the volume can be accidentally changed if something brushes against the alarm clock, which means that I have to check the alarm volume every night, just to be sure. Our previous alarm clock was especially bad – it had a large knob that was very easy to bump.

The radio volume can’t be lowered enough. Of course, the volume can be turned all the way down, so that you hear nothing. (Why do all volume controls support turning it all the way down? Wouldn’t the power button work if you didn’t want to hear it at all?) You slowly turn the volume up, and get nothing, nothing, nothing, and then it abruptly switches to a volume that’s louder than what you want. There’s simply no way to set the radio to soft. The whole point of the radio is to wake me up without a loud buzzing; I don’t want loud music, either.

The backup battery isn’t much of a backup. Standard battery backup behavior is to preserve the time and alarm settings when the power goes out, but the clock doesn’t actually work while there’s no power. That’s certainly better than nothing; if the power goes out briefly, it’s nice to not lose your time and alarm settings. But does an alarm clock really drain so much power that it can’t simply work normally and sound the alarm even if the power is still out?

The AM/PM indicator and the active alarm indicator are indistinguishable little lights. Worse still, alarm clocks can’t seem to agree on whether the AM/PM light should indicate AM or PM; our last alarm clock thought it should be used for PM, but our current alarm clock uses it for AM. This makes figuring out whether the alarm is set basically impossible. Couldn’t the clock simply use letters for AM and PM?

The alarm time can’t be set in the dark. I can’t say that I mind pushing buttons to set the alarm time that much, but it is certainly annoying when it can’t be done in the dark, and when the controls are little buttons with labels, there’s not much chance of getting it right if you can’t read them.

The radio can’t be tuned in the dark. If the radio tuner isn’t digital, and the analog panel isn’t backlit, there’s not much hope of finding a radio station without ample light and a lot of patience.

There are countless other features that could make a good alarm clock great, but I’d just settle for good. If you know of an alarm clock that doesn’t suffer from any of these problems, I’d love to hear about it.