What ho!

A couple of years ago I was looking through a catalog and saw the best alarm clock ever. You are awakened by the dulcet voice of Stephen Fry making sardonic comments. As a fan of Jeeves and Wooster, I love the idea of having Jeeves as my butler. Plus, how can you not enjoy starting your day with a line like "It appears to be morning. Very inconvenient, I agree. I believe it is the rotation of the Earth that is to blame, Sir."

This is an improvement over my current alarm clock which gives you a choice of three sounds: mechanical buzzing (which ranks right below a fire alarm on my list of annoying sounds you do not want to wake up to), chimes, and cathedral bells. The last two choices have suspiciously similar melodies, but the chimes are a bit more jarring, so I've pretty much always used the cathedral setting. That was never a problem until I took the clock with me to college and slept in a dorm under a clock tower. I don't know how many times I woke up to the bells confused because it wasn't time to get up yet. It took me ages to realize it was just Old Main's "angry chicken" chiming the hour and not my alarm clock, since they sound the same.

At any rate, I was recently reminded of the existence of the "Good Morning Sir" alarm clock through a crazy random happenstance, and decided it was high time to buy it. And with this clock, I won't have the same experience I did in college. What are the chances that Stephen Fry would come to my house?