Life lessons

I'm pretty sure that the Buddha was wrong about attachments. Be that as it may, I've rarely been able to muster the sort of enthusiasm for things^[1] that is required for successful navigation of consumer culture. Sometimes this bites me in the ass.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I was browsing in a Best Buy while waiting for a bus and I found myself in the clock radio aisle. Actually, I sought out the clock radio aisle. And I did this for the fairly straightforward reason that I didn't own an alarm clock or a radio, and both seemed like the sort of thing that a fully vested American consumer ought to own.

Two birds with one stone was the idea. Three birds if you count passing the time while waiting for the bus.

So I bought a clock radio. More precisely, I bought the cheapest clock radio in stock. What need do I have, my thinking went, for a top shelf clock radio? They all have clocks. They all have radios. Only a fool, I thought, would pay more than bottom dollar.

The following is an incomplete list, in no particular order, of reasons I've discovered for investing in a better than bottom shelf clock radio:

• Cheap clock radios are not well shielded. This means that if your cellphone, laptop or other electronic device gets within, say, five feet of the clock radio then the radio will periodically emit sounds which are indistinguishable from the sound of its alarm, except for being noticably louder.
  
• Cheap clock radios have crappy reception. Also, digital tuning is probably worth ten bucks.
  
• Cheap clock radios have screwed up user interfaces. Where this really hits me with my cheap clock radio is the sleep function. For some reason, it isn't possible to simultaneously use the sleep function to listen to the radio and have the alarm buzzer activated. What this means in practice is that if you want to listen to the radio while going to sleep you need to have the volume turned up loud enough to wake you up.

The list goes on. I suppose that I ought to chuck the radio and buy a new one. But you know what Buddha says: You cannot travel the path until you have become the path.

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1 This is assuming that the category of things doesn't include computers. For defense of the claim that computers are not mere things, but are in fact agents, read eripsa's blog.