Alarm Clock vs Motorola Razr

I had a test this morning, and I needed to study for it. Actually, I needed to study for it really bad, so I had to pull an all nighter. Well, at least I tried to pull an all nighter, but I got really tired at like 4 in the morning. So I decided to take a quick nap. Give myself an hour of sleep to refresh, and then get back to studying. So I set an alarm for 5 AM on my computer and laid down. But while I was laying in bed, I decided that a second alarm would be nice. Configure this second alarm to go off at 5:05 just to annoy me out of bed, because I know I'll jump up and hit snooze on my computer alarm right at 5. A second alarm might force me up sooner. And my motorola razr phone was sitting right next to my bed, so I grabbed it, and quickly programmed an alarm for 5:05 and quickly drifted off to sleep.

5 o'clock comes around, and my computer alarm goes off, slowly ramping the volume for me, and playing some easy jazz music. Off course, I'm still dead tired, so I got up and convinced myself to hit snooze and lay down for just a little bit longer. A couple minutes later, my razr alarm goes off. In the dark I fumble for my phone, and quickly mash the side buttons (on the outside of the phone) with my thumb (in order to hit snooze), and fall back asleep.

Couple minutes later, my computer alarm goes off again. I probably hit snooze a few more times on my computer before I actually got up. But the whole point to this story is that the alarm on my razr never went off again! I hit snooze, and it decided to stop on me! WTF?!?

Now I've been using motorola cell phones for years now, and I've used the alarm feature many times on my last motorola phone. I would trust it just fine. But this is the first time I'd used the alarm feature on my razr. So I found it hard to believe that the software would have such an obvious bug. I wanted to get to the bottom of this, so I started testing the alarm later that day. Everytime I tested it, it worked just fine. When the alarm goes off, I can hit any button on the outside of the phone to put it to sleep, and it will go off again after the snooze duration perfectly. That is, until I discovered the most hideous software engineering mistake of all time:

If you hit a button on the outside of the phone once, it snoozes the alarm. If you again hit another button on the outside of the phone, it turns the alarm off!

So when I had reached for the phone, and quickly pressed an outside button, I had inadvertantly pressed 2 buttons at the same time, and turned the alarm off! Now it's not like I'm a professional basketball player, with giant hands. Anybody who has ever used a razr before will tell you how easy it is to press two buttons on that thing on accident. Even worse, the volume buttons are actually one button, where you have to press one side or the other to turn the volume up or down. But if you press in the middle of this button, you actually press in both buttons. And since this volume button is the biggest button on the outside of the phone, I'm assuming this is what happend.

So apparently motorola expects me to wake up to my phone alarm, and ever so carefully, while still half asleep, in the dark, use my pinky finger to press snooze, and be attentive enough to not press any more buttons after that. Brilliant work Motorola. You suck. Thank goodness for my computer alarm, or I would have failed my test this morning.

PS - I still love my motorola phone, I just won't depend on it's alarm clock. And I was exagerrating when I said it was the biggest software engineering mistake ever. This mistake would have to compete with microsoft for that honor...