I am a slave to my alarm clock. It ticks out the minutes and hours I am allotted for sleep, and then wrests me from dreamland with a jangle whose volume is set high enough to revive the comatose.

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! You might think the world is complicated enough and there’s no need to make basic tasks harder, right? Right?

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In the fall, when mornings are slow to brighten and the clocks shift back, there’s a pull to linger a little longer under the covers. But the outside world rarely adjusts in kind – school bells still ...