During the last few decades I've attended many professional meetings in various cities around the country and have taken numerous vacation trips as well. On these travels I've always taken a small travel alarm clock with me to help me do that get-up-in-the-morning thing.

However, on one motorcycle trip from San Francisco to a bike rally in South Dakota I had to use a substitute clock. I had lost the old clock's tiny, shiny round battery and was unable to replace it in time for the trip.

A foolish mistake.

I hadn't realized, or had been in denial about the changes modern improvements make in some of life's simplest things.

My little old plastic analog clock has a standard clock face with easy-to-read numerals and a third hand to set the alarm. The nearly two-inch round face with glow-in-the-dark hands is readable from across a hotel room.

The new and improved wake-up device is many, many times the size of the old one and weighs ten and a half ounces vs. the one and a half-ounce old one. A hefty improvement since I try to travel light.

This modern, digital contraption comes with a

twenty-page, illustrated instruction booklet. Believe me, it's required reading.

During preparations for the ride to South Dakota, I installed two new AA batteries, studied the instruction booklet and practiced setting the time and the alarm on the idiot digital, liquid crystal display. Not an operation for a busy analog person.

One might consider taking some vacation time just to learn the intricacies of using three tiny buttons, thin projections the size of the lead in a pencil, protruding through the face of the idiot clock.

Before setting the time I had to input the month, date, then the time of day and finally the desired alarm time. After the alarm time was set however, the idiot alarm function had to be activated, and indeed, in the required program sequence, including the utterly irrelevant month and date functions.

I didn't need a calendar, I just needed to wake up in time to get on the road and cover a day's worth of miles. And the idiot LCD display is only three-quarters of an inch wide and three-eighths of an inch high. Impossible to read from a night table, let alone from across a motel room even if you're young enough not to need glasses. But don'tcha love progress?

The instructions required starting any setting the same way, "With the current time on the display..." and then,

with great care so as to not push more than one at a time of the tiny, close-set buttons, follow the devious directions. With the old analog alarm clock I just needed to rotate the hands with a dial to set the time or alarm.

And, naturally, traveling through time zones required resetting the damn digital device all over again using those three tiny nubs. I had to find the instruction booklet, get by the month and date to set the current time, and if the wake-up time was different, set the new alarm time. One might not be in the mood late at night and in need of sleep, to be screwing with tiny nubs, programming an idiot clock.

Progress.

Yeah.

And I'd better not touch those three little idiot buttons by accident and screw-up the settings that took so long to finalize, clumsy.

The deafening, unearthly blare the alarm makes would scare the pants off anybody the first time one hears it. It sounds like an emergency screech - - a warning of an impending tornado, tsunami or terrorist attack. It could wake up an entire motel.

And I didn't want to use the other neat little snooze, earphone or radio features. Hell, all I wanted to do was wake up. But having to wake up in a modern, digital fashion, well, I have an appropriate digit, one each hand, to display towards that idiot digital clock.

You can bet I located a battery to install in my old, travel worn, easy-to-use, analog travel alarm clock before I hit the road again.

So much for the twenty-first century.