Siri made me stupid, or Did you know you can set an iPhone alarm to repeat every day?
I hate to give Android fanboys fuel for the flames, but it is true that sometimes convenience makes us stupid. Don’t take me the wrong way. I love my iPhone. I love using it. I love the way it works. I’ve never had as enjoyable an experience using a mobile device as I have had since I bought my iPhone 4S. I sometimes wish it was more like webOS, but otherwise I am quite happy.
However, last night I realized that I had accepted a less than ideal situation simply because it was the most convenient at the time. Let me give you a little background. One of the first actions that I found out Siri could do was setting an alarm. Just say “Wake me up at 7 o’clock,” or “I need to get up in 6 hours, ” or “Set my alarm to go off at 7:30,” and Siri figures out why you are talking about and sets the alarm accordingly. I love this feature. There’s nothing worse than trying to fumble with menus and buttons when you really just want to crawl into bed, and I’ve found that Siri often understands my slurred, half asleep speech better than my wife does. In the 10 months I’ve had my iPhone 4S, Siri has only failed me twice, which is much better odds than I was running before.
It had started getting on my nerves that I had to set the alarm every single night, though. Also, every single night Siri would remind me, “You already have an alarm set for 7:30. I turned it on for you.” As if she had this insatiable need to complain about how she has done this every night for the past 10 months. (Quit complaining! You have no rights, machine! Get back to work!) On my previous phones, I had been able to set an alarm for every weekday. Then, all I had to do was turn it off in the morning when I woke up. It would automatically be ready for the next morning. Since I had always used Siri to set the alarm. I didn’t know that my iPhone could do the same thing.
Last night I went to bed after my wife, and I didn’t want to wake her up by talking to Siri. So, I manually set the alarm clock. I opened the Clock app, and I accidentally tapped the Edit button on the Alarm tab.
That’s when I saw the “Repeat” option.
I tapped it, and saw that I could set the alarm to repeat on specific days. I tapped Monday through Friday, then tapped “Back.”
Now, the Edit Alarm screen showed “Weekdays” next to the Repeat option. On that screen you can also choose a different sound to wake up to, turn the snooze option off (What sick person would do that?!) and change the label of the alarm.
The last option is nice if you have a specific reason for an alarm clock, like remembering to take out the trash, or if you feel like berating yourself will help you get out of bed.
Now, is it Siri’s fault that I didn’t know about these options before? No, not exactly. It was just so simple and convenient to ask her to wake me up in the morning that I never investigated further. The irony is that if I hadn’t used the simple, convenient method to set my alarm clock, I would have discovered something that would have literally saved me hours over the course of the past 10 months. Oh well.