Photo credit: nudson (flickr)
That’s the amount of time my phone gives me to snooze. Why nine? I’d like to be able to adjust it but I can’t. Some mornings I like to have a 5 minute snooze but instead I end up being slightly late cos nine is just awkward. A quick Google (585,000 results) has thrown up this explanaition:
By the time the snooze feature was added in the 1950’s, the innards of alarm clocks had long been standardized. This meant that the teeth on the snooze gear had to mesh with the existing gear configuration, leaving engineers with a single choice: They could set the snooze for either a little more than nine minutes, or a little more than 10 minutes. But because reports indicated that 10 minutes was too long, allowing people to fall back into a “deep” sleep, clock makers decided on the nine-minute gear, believing people would wake up easier and happier after a shorter snooze. We’d tend to disagree with that logic, but, then, we must be in the lazy minority. Although today’s digital clocks can be programmed to have a snooze of any length, most stick with nine minutes because that’s what consumers expect. (http://www.mentalfloss.com/trivia/questions/?m=200609)
It seems strange that they wouldn’t make a setting for it nowadays though. By the looks of things I won’t be the last one asking that question.
4 replies on “Nine minutes”
Mine is 9 too – is yours a Sony by any chance? It’s very annoying indeed. I don’t like getting up at odd minutes. It has to be 5 past or 10 past etc. Peter Kay does a good sketch on this
Annie: Yep, a Sony Ericsson. I think it may be a universal thing though. I end up setting my clock for 7.11am. Must YouTube for that sketch.
Ah just get up when the alarm goes ya lazy bunch.
[…] Getting up 9 minutes after my alarm goes: I’ve posted about the 9 minute snooze before. My alarm goes, I wake up and spend 9 minutes snoozing before I need to swing the legs out of the […]