The Clock Talks

There’s a joke in a Woody Allen movie about a man who kicked a TV set. The next time he went into an elevator, he heard an ominous voice say as the doors closed, ‘are you that guy who kicked the TV?’ The elevator had apparently been waiting for him.

Something similar happened to us this morning. Whitley’s alarm clock fell onto the floor beside his bed, and when he reached down to pick it up, it talked! It said, ‘I want to stay down.’ We both heard it, but the problem is that there isn’t anything about the clock that would enable it to talk—much less to say something like that.

So we were pretty puzzled, and yet, also very sleepy, so we wanted to stay down, too.

This is obviously not the only strange thing that has ever happened in our lives, and, in fact, it’s somewhat similar to something that happened when we were just a couple of newly married kids.

We were living in an old apartment building on the west side of Manhattan, on the top floor. We had few possessions, but one of them was a stereo system, a nice Fisher receiver, a turntable and speakers.

One evening, the receiver was on. We’d been playing records, so it wasn’t playing the radio. It was simply silent, with the face glowing. All of a sudden, it started talking to Whitley. I don’t really remember the conversation (it’s detailed in Solving the Communion Enigma) but I sure remember how it ended. The voice said, ‘I know something else about you.’ Whitley said, ‘what?’ It didn’t answer. It never answered. In fact, we never heard it again.

I will say this: the receiver talked in the voice of a young man. The clock sounded like a child.
Go figure!

Update: We discovered that the clock does have the ability to make many different alarm sounds, so we’ve decided to believe that one of the was triggered for a couple of seconds, and just happened to sound like a child talking. Yeah, we believe it…