When I am in europe, I try to do it the euro way. It allows me to cling on to being british.
A common thing in hotels is to have the magic TV that has a radio, and timer builtin (as well as teletext, which was missed in the US…. it allows you to read about anything via your TV).
Since you have these features baked into the TV, you don’t need a bedside table alarm clock, and instead of doing the right thing (and having me own) I decided to set my alarm for this morning via the TV.
The TV menu is all in Danish (which makes sense since I am in Denmark) but I managed to luckily change it to english via some guess work.
I then set the timer to turn on the TV at 7am until 7:30am. I also make sure that a loud channel is setup before I turn it off for the night.
Then at 9am I get a bang on my door from Ben, as we are speaking together first thing in the morning. Ouch!
What happened?
I got to debug the problem after the talk, and it turned out that the TV *did* turn on, but it switched on at a channel that has no audio (showing what is happening at the hotel and such) and I guess a small amount of light from a TV wasn’t enough to wake someone who had been flying for 24 hours.
I think Pres Bush said: “Fool me once shame on me….”
This isn’t the first time I screwed up. I did a similar thing in Belgium, where I set the TV correctly, but I fell asleep with the TV on. This meant that the act of re-turning the TV on at 6am didn’t really do much to wake me up either. That was a fun wild dash to the airport and just making it.
Ah the glamours of travel.
January 28th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Dion, try using the alarm in your mobile phone. You do have one of those don’t you?