I love my iPhone and rely on it for many many things in my life. Because of this it pains me when a truly horrible iPhone user experience comes my way where i have to ask myself: “How did this ever get pas QA?”

In iOS there is this neat feature called “Do Not Disturb”. I love it and it makes life so much nicer. It basically turns of all those bleeps and bluprs off, so that you are not disturbed.

The main use I make of it is that I don’t want messages that arrive while I sleep to wake me. So for this reason i set it to automatically turn on at night. Usually I’m pretty regular in my sleep pattern. I am likely to be in bed by midnight and seldom have to get up before 6:45 in the morning.

So i set my iPhone to turn this feature on from 11 o’clock at night until half past 6 in the morning. It works like a charm, set and forget and you will have quiet during the night.

It works too well in fact. Because what happened to me recently is that I set my iPhone alarm explicitly to ring at 6:20 in the morning, because I had to for once to get up early. I figured I explicitly set an alarm, it always wakes me up during the week, why would I not rely on it for this?

Well you can probably already guess what happened: I woke up on my own at 8:45 in the morning, way too late to salvage anything. I was yelling at myself, how could I have overheard the alarm?

Easy actually. I overheard it because it did not in fact ring. Whoever thought that “Do Not Disturb” applies to a utility that you have to explicitly set; a utility that has no other purpose than to in fact disturb you; a utility that is so clearly out of the scope of the “Do Not Disturb” feature?

I mean I could even understand it if you had turned on “Do not Disturb” manually, but if it’s been activated automatically? How did this ever get past QA.

I am sorely disappointed, but it did teach me a valuable lesson: do not rely on modern technology for anything important.

Since then I have dug out my ancient wind-up alarm-clock that my grandfather gave to me when I was four. I set it eery night now and let it tick-tock me off to sleep. I still also set my iPhone, but it has lost the trust i had placed in it. It will have to work hard to earn back that trust.