It doesn't matter if it's a standard wind up alarm clock or the latest high-tech CD alarm clock, nothing quite satisfies our inner child so much as taking a large blunt object to a ringing alarm clock. Although it can be fun to break up just about anything, there's a particularly sweet moment when the alarm clock stops ringing and you know it will never ring again. Why is this?

Order Can Be Annoying

For most of our lives, we have to fit ourselves into other people's schedules. Then, we have to go to school and be at a particular room with a particular text book for a particular time. Things don’t get much better once we graduate and have to work for a living. Life just becomes a series of compromises to time.

Smashing an alarm clock into tiny pieces might be the only socially acceptable way of rebelling against this conformity. Although we all need schedules to some degree, but their novelty sure wears off by the time you're of legal drinking age. You can feel powerless under these circumstances. Your alarm clock then becomes the symbol of tyranny instead of being merely a small mechanical device.

The Puritan Work Ethic

Our society has been heavily influenced by the Puritan or Protestant work ethic, which means if you're not unconscious, you have to be busy. "Idle hands begets the Devil's work" is the reasoning behind this rule. This also extended into having any kind of frivolous fun, such as reading the comics as opposed to the news in your newspaper. Life was viewed as being meant for work, not for having fun.

This means alarm clocks are essential as a roof and a floor in your home because you have to be on time. If you aren’t on time, you're lazy and have no will power and are on the fast track to Hell. Alarm clocks, therefore, keep you holy.

And they drive you absolutely nuts. When you are in a deep sleep, dreaming very private dreams that the Puritans definitely wouldn’t approve of and then the alarm clock goes off, you reach your last straw. You've worked years and years at being on time and deserve to indulge in a good dream. But even that gets cut off to remind you to get up and be busy.

You don’t even turn the alarm clock off. You get up, walk over to the closet, pull out a tool, walking stick, a copy of "War and Peace", walk calmly over to the still ringing alarm clock and that bash away. This is far more therapeutic than going to a psychologist.