It Must Be 9
My dad’s watch has had the alarm stuck on for years. Neither of us could figure out how to turn the damn thing off. I think one of the buttons doesn’t work. In any event, it used to be set to go off at midnight. So every night, my parents would be in bed when the watch went off, at which point my dad would note, “It’s midnight”. Then my dad had an idea: while it’s impossible to turn off the alarm, he’s still able to set it. So about a year ago he set it to 9:00, figuring that no matter which 9:00 the watch went with, it shouldn’t be too intrusive at that time. Turns out it’s 9:00 PM, at which time the family is often eating dinner or watching TV or something.
Now, it just so happens that my mother has high-frequency hearing loss, so she can’t hear the alarm. As a result, she spent years thinking that she had married a crazy person; every night he’d announce that it must be midnight and claim it was a result of his alarm going off, but she’d’ve heard an alarm and there very clearly wasn’t an alarm. But when he set it to 9, my brother and I started hearing it too. My father was vindicated.
And now, every night at 9 o’clock, we remind her.