I used to really enjoy reading Dave Barry, back when his column was in the Detroit News. That was a long time ago, I kind of lost touch with him as a humorist for several years, and now when I occasionally encounter something he wrote it seems kind of flat. I guess that Pulitzer was a long time ago.
Anyway, I say all that as prologue to the fact that I was just reading a Dave Barry 2017 holiday gift guide which really isn’t all that funny but it did include a mention of a product which, if real, would be about the dumbest gadget idea I ever heard of. And it was at the end of a Dave Barry list, so I already had some very silly gadgets in my mind. He described it but you can’t always assume something he describes is real, so I looked it up.
It’s real. It’s not only real, it’s sold on Amazon under like a dozen brand names.
Imagine it with me, Mr. and Mrs. America: An alarm clock that, when it goes off, you half-asleep lift a gun-like object and shoot a target on top of the clock to put it into snooze mode.
What, I ask you, could possibly go wrong?
What could go wrong? Given that the one I looked at on Amazon had 33% one-star ratings, I would say that much could go wrong. The others had similarly bad ratings, or no ratings at all. No sale!
So long as it’s the only “gun-like object” in the room . . . nothing of consequence, I’d think.
Gonna need another clock…
Raise your hand if that’s not a safe assumption at your house…
What Unclezip said.
Yesterday: no driveway alarm, no vehicle on video, yet I heard the garage service door being ever-so-gently closed. I took my “clock” with me when I investigated. Happy ending. Odd but innocuous things do occur sometime…
Kentucky was right. I too used to read Barry; he was sporadically funny, but constantly a wimp. Probably nothing more deadly in his house than a flyswatter, so this “clock” toy would make him feel like a he-man.
For the rest of, us, no, very bad idea.
The old Army-Navy store in Red Bluff, CA used to have a large wind-up alarm clock (at that time that was the only kind available. Yes, I am that old.) mounted, for display, with a plaque announcing it was bagged at deer camp by an old guy (who shall remain nameless) when it went off at the heathenish hour of 0400.
The hands of the clock were laying at the bottom of thr plastic face cover.
A bullet from a 30-’06 had perfectly center-punched the face of the clock and the shaft to which the hands had been attached.
I suspect that a late night around the campfire including breath of life may have preceded the incident.
I used to keep my carry gun on the nightstand while I slept, but it got knocked off once and it was in the way. Now I have a kydex holster attached to the bed frame, and it is both more secure and even more available if it were ever needed.
This gadget sounds like a really dumb idea, even if there were no actual guns in the house. But I’m all for anything that gives the Darwin award to as many dumb shits as possible, so let the free market prevail. Fewer damned fools underfoot wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all.
On the other hand, if you did pick up a different gun shaped object it would also make the alarm stop and you would be wide awake.
And even if you missed, the alarm would stop ‘cuz you’d be deaf.