This Week's Sneak Peek

Sunday morning, at 3:15, we were awakened by my phone.

It wasn't a phone call.

Or an amber, silver, or severe weather alert.

It was some "Health" app that had decided that 3:15 a.m. was when I ought to get out of bed and start my day.

I have no recollection of installing the "Health" app on my phone. Did it show up when I enrolled in a Medicare Part D plan? Or, since it's on the first screen of the app listings, has it been there since I first bought the phone? Either way, I most certainly never told it to wake me up in the middle of the night — or to go to bed at 9:43 p.m., which I noticed it doing while I was watching TV Saturday night.

The 3:15 alarm used the same ring tone that I had selected back last October on the last night of the AAEC convention in Montréal, the one and only time that I have ever asked my phone to wake me up. It's a sound that resembles a piano, starting very softly and gradually increasing in volume.

I used to have an alarm clock that would wake me up by playing a selected track from a CD. One of my favorite tracks to wake up to was the second movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, which starts out with a soft, slow, minimalist piano passage, eventually joined by woodwinds and the rest of the orchestra. That alarm feature stopped working reliably several months ago, and the alarm clock I bought to replace it with doesn't let me select the wake-up track. It starts playing at the point that I last turned it off.

Anyway, back in Montréal: I'm quite sure that I used the clock app on the phone, not some Health app I was totally unfamiliar with,  to set the alarm so I wouldn't miss my red-eye flight home. It worked, and good thing, too: I never got the wake-up call I had requested from the hotel front desk, and the room alarm clock, sounding a few minutes after my phone, was an unpleasant BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP that would have left me in a foul mood for the whole day.

It's still a mystery why this Health app would suddenly have resurrected that alarm setting five months after the one and only time I had ever used it. Opening the app, I found that it was keeping track of how many flights of stairs I had climbed every day for the past week. It might have logged my time on the exercise bicycle if I owned a smart watch or perhaps strapped the phone to my leg. 

What else might it have been up to? Was it counting my drinks when we were in New Orleans last month? All that southern fried food? Has it been analyzing my trips to the toilet?

Do I really want my phone nagging me to go to bed at 9:43?

I think I've succeeded in turning that wake-up alarm off, or at least changing the time to 8:00. It didn't poke me to go to bed last night while I was still drawing this week's cartoon, and it wasn't alarming after I got up today.

But maybe five months from now...