So I'm already in bed and my husband sets the alarm for the following morning. I ask what time he set the alarm for, wondering if I'll be awake or not. See, occassionally he wakes a few minutes before the alarm and gets a jump on the day by taking an early shower. The problem being that he's awake, but barely, so he forgets to turn off the non-ringing alarm before hopping in the shower. I'm sound asleep when the alarm goes off, and off, and off, and offfffff. I resist getting up to smack it because I know he needs to be awake. By the time I realize he's either already up or dead, I'm very fully awake and can't go back to sleep. But thats neither here nor there ... 7:17 is a perfectly acceptable time to set the alarm (as opposed to 5:00), kind of.
Think about that number ... 7:17. What kind of person sets the alarm for 7:17!?! It should be either 7:15 or 7:20. Because thats the way life should be. You should set the alarm for a specific time, not just some randomly close number you arrive at by hitting the fast forward button on the alarm until its CLOSE to the time you should get up! Its an alarm, it should be precise. By "precise" I mean that it should be rounded to the closest acceptable multiple of 5. Setting the alarm for a randomly chosen 7:17 is ... is ... is ... unAmerican! He might as well be FRENCH! Yes, yes, thats definitely something the French would do. I don't even know how he can live that way!
I knew a fellow who used to do this with his microwave. Instead of five minutes, he'd enter 5:02, just to be contrary.
Then there was an elderly lady I was going to give a ride somewhere once. I phoned her to see what time I should pick her up:
"How about noon?"
—"No, that's too early."
"How about quarter after?"
—"No, that's too late."
"How about five after?"
—"No, that's too early."
"How about ten after?"
—Handwringing silence; then, "No, that's too late."
I was tempted to ask her, "How about 12:07 and 30 seconds?" But I was afraid this would send her into an infinite regress, like Spock on Star Trek ordering the computer to calculate pi to the last decimal place...