The jury is definitely still out when it comes to alarm clocks. Some would claim that they are useful devices without which modern society would not function, while there are other, some might say more cynical, people who are adamant that they are in fact hellish devices sent straight from the hands of the devil himself.

So what are they?

At a first glance an alarm clock might look just like any other clock. They come in all the standard species - digital, analogue and with-lots-of-daft-extra-features* and at first glance generally look entirely innocuous

On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that they are anything but ordinary. After a great deal of careful disection there can be found a second clock setting that doesn't change with time. When the time on the standard clock matches this time then the clock will make a noise, alerting the user of the time and allowing them to do other tasks in the meantime without the risk of missing an important appointment. Often they are used to wake their owner up after a good night's sleep.

So what's the problem?

It would seem that such a device would be extremely useful, and indeed they can be, but they can also be enough to drive a perfectly sane person crazy.

• The noise they make is purposefully designed to be as annoying as possible. beep. beep! BEEP! BEEP!BEEP! Aaaaaaarrrrgggghhhh!! It has been speculated that this is a plot on behalf the alarm clock manufacturers to get the hapless victims to smash the alarn clocks against the wall in frustration, just maximising their profits. It must be pointed out, though, that there is no conclusive proof that the scum sucking weasels atually do this, it is only conecture.
• It is guaranteed that if one person in a household sets an alarm clock to wake themself up then they will be the heaviest sleeper in the house and manage to sleep peacefully through the monotonous tones of evil resonating out from within the clock to throughout the rest of the household, and occasionally the entire neighbourhood.
• It is a hard and fast rule of nature that on the one day when it is more important than any other that you wake up the batteries of the clock will run out ensuring that you oversleep and miss that appointment you had to be given an extremely large cheque* for no apparent reason. Every other day you will, of course, wake up before the alarm clock goes off (although not long enough before to turn it off so it stops beeping.

Whether this is all coincidence or whether alarm clocks really are possesed by some of the more devious of the legions of hell is left as an exercise to the reader.