I got my first clock radio at the start of the school year, I think in seventh grade. I’m such a light sleeper that I never did well with alarms. My parents are both heavy sleepers who had to keep their alarm clocks across the room in order to be sure they woke up. I, on the other hand, would fly out of bed and across the room, frantically pushing buttons in order to make the noise stop. It was like waking up having a heart attach every morning. There were even times that I stomped down the hall to my parents room, threw open the door and pounded on their alarm to get it to turn off, grumpily shouting “Your alarm is going off!” at them.
So the switch to waking up to the gentle sounds of the radio came as a very welcome change for me. I’ve stuck with it ever since and it has worked very well. Well, once there was the time that it accidentally got set an hour ahead somehow. I didn’t realize the time was wrong until I got in the car to drive to work and thought, wow, it is awfully dark outside. I was seriously pissed off that morning. I don’t like mornings to begin with, and to realize I had gotten up at 5 am unnecessarily really, really bothered me. And then there was last night, when I apparently lost the knowledge I’ve had since I was 13 and set the alarm for 6:30 pm instead of 6:30 am. Thank goodness I have a little dog with a keen sense of time to wake me up in the morning. That didn't help me feel any less stupid, but it did help me get to work on time.
I did that once when I taught high school. I accidentally set my clock ahead an hour the night before and set my alarm for 5AM like always. Got up, stopped at Kroger on the way to school, got to school and no custodian to let me in. She arrived twenty minutes later and when I walked in and saw it said 5AM, I flipped out. I woke up at 4AM. YIKES cubed. So I feel your pain.