I love stories like this. I read it in a book about how
people respond to life's annoyances.
There was this group of college boys in which one always
went away for the weekend to see his girlfriend. Nothing wrong
with that, but he would forget to turn off his alarm clock and
his house mates had to listen to it sounding on Saturday and
Sunday mornings.
One of the boys was handy with electronics so he decided
to take care of things in a technologically oriented manner.
He disassembled the alarm clock and found that there was
a jumper wire inside that could be soldered to one of two
places. One place was meant for North America and countries that
use 60-HZ power. The other possible place for the wire was to a
terminal meant to be connected if the clock was used in some
part of the world like the UK or Asia where most power is
delivered at 50 HZ.
The boy connected the jumper to that terminal and put
the clock back together.
The re-wire had the effect of making the clock run about
17% too fast here in the US. A minute ended in just 50 seconds
and the error, of course, compounded as time passed. If you set
the clock at Midnight, the clock would think it was Noon by ten
o'clock the next morning.
The prankster probably set the clock more or less
correctly about the time the young man got back from his weekend
so he didn't suspect anything.
Some time early the next morning his alarm went off and
probably looked right until he got up and discovered that it was
hours too early.
According to the story, it about drove the clock's owner
crazy. He would reset it over and over and was mystified as to
what, on Earth was wrong.
I hope the prankster finally put it back right, but that
was a clever trick especially since it wasn't me it happened to.
Martin
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