A lot of alarms can be configured to have barriers that prevent you from easily turning them off. The idea is it forces you to mentally engage and wake up a bit.

It might be the lock screen, simple or difficult math problems, visual puzzles, etc. Until you solve it, it won’t turn off the alarm.

It’s a neat idea until this happens, I guess.

I swear I've posted this before:

I used to have a job that required me to be up at 4 or 5am. I am not a morning person, and this requirement was equivalent to a normal person being told they need to write their weekly sales reports using a pencil taped to their knee. Or something.

Anyway, I had this early wake up time, but a problem with shutting my alarm off without actually waking up.

So I took a normal alarm clock, cracked it open, and soldered a 5m length of speaker wire to the circuit board. I drilled a hole in my headboard and mounted an external speaker there. The alarm clock itself was placed in a backpack, with the zippers tied together with a key ring, and the whole thing stuffed in my closet.

So each morning, I was forced to get out of bed, go to the closet, fiddle with the key ring to separate the 2 zippers, then finally turn the alarm off.

I had roommates at the time; they weren't very happy with me. But they were my brother and a good friend, so to hell with them :)

Imagining this story from their perspective paints a pretty bad picture of you.

Don’t worry, OP left out the plot twist where they got a huge payday from that job. Their siblings forgave them and they’re now living it up in a sweet mansion in Hawaii.

Everything you wrote is true, except the huge payday and the mansion in Hawaii.

Nah, the plot twist was that we were all in our early 20s, and had mismatched schedules. Whatever annoyance my morning routine caused was matched with their late nights partying when I had work the next morning.

And I got pretty quick about silencing that alarm. (And getting a better job.)

I bought through Kickstarter a Ramos alarm clock which requires entering a code through a separate keypad (defaulting to MMDD) to turn it off. Unplugging the alarm clock doesn't turn it off. The only options are to turn it off before it goes off or enter the code.

After my kids were born, I stopped using it because we didn't want to wake up the kids (I've had my phone on silent mode for the last six and a half years now). All was well and good until one day the cleaning lady apparently turned the alarm on and I didn't notice. The alarm went off in the morning and I went to the keypad in the bathroom to turn off the alarm—and the batteries in it had died. I ended up taking the alarm clock to the basement and wrapping it in a towel until the battery backup gave up.

That's funny. If I had heard about that product when it was announced, I probably would have backed it.

I used to use an iOS app called FreakyAlarm. It had all sorts of features to enforce wake up time. You could set it to just require that you solve a math problem, or move the hands on an analog clock to "28/4:(36+15)" (Meaning, move the hour hand to 7 and the minute hand to 51.), and all sorts of "games" that you're unlikely able to do in a half-asleep state.

But my favorite was the barcode scanner. You scanned a random UPC (I chose my shaving cream), and in the morning the alarm would not shut off until you went and scanned it again. But that got me in trouble once when I was on a business trip, and didn't pack that particular brand of shaving cream.

Of course it's just an iOS app, so you can force quit it and uninstall it faster than doing any of the tasks. But I preferred honor to cheating that way.

I don't use any alarm clock anymore. I have dogs. They're remarkably consistent.

There's a great way to get added to a national watch list if the deconstructed alarm innards were found or you were googling some specific keywords for the pin out schematics lol

I have a friend who had a dorm in college with 3 other guys, and all of them had problems waking up to alarm clocks. They each had an alarm clock that they placed in a different part of the room, so each of them would have to get up to shut it off. One day they discovered that they overslept, each of the 4 clocks had been turned off but nobody remembered doing it.

My favorite was the physical alarm clock that would launch a propeller across your bedroom. The only way to turn off the alarm was to find the propeller and put it back on the base.

I was initially thinking Clocky, but Clocky was an alarm on wheels.

I don't think the propeller one had any name beyond "flying alarm clock" or somesuch, and the failure mode seems way worse: if the propeller shoots out an open window or wedges itself behind furniture you're hosed.

Plus finding a small propeller in the dark corners of your room while just woken up seems way too stressful a task, frankly.

A bit tangential, but I had a tendency to just sleep through my alarm. I ended up getting an alarm called "The Earthquake", or some similar cliche. It had a module that you'd stick under your sheets or mattress and would violently vibrate when the alarm went off.

I quickly learned how to disable an alarm while groggy instead of sleeping straight through it.