My sleep was just destroyed by mindless modern cruelty. The stupid cell phone battery alarm went off -- not once but twice!

Because I can't get back to sleep, I Googled the problem, and found that I am not alone:

It's 2 a.m., and I want to tell you why I hate Motorola. I should be circumspect, since I've had the privilege of serving Motorola as a consultant, and the company was an exceptional client. But I've been staring at the ceiling now for more than an hour, my sleep destroyed by a thoughtful feature on my cell phone called the Low Battery alarm.

In the normal course of events, when I arrive home in the evening, I plug my cell phone into its charger, which sits on the kitchen counter not too far from the coffeemaker and the key rack. In the morning before I leave, I make my coffee, grab my keys and phone, and go on with my life. The phone is happy. I'm happy. The world is a happy place.

SILLY DADDY. Every so often something disrupts this routine, however. Sometimes I forget to take my phone out of my pocket. Sometimes my two-year-old finds the phone and, after exhausting the imaginative possibilities of make-believe conversation, abandons it under a couch or behind the desk. And there the phone sits, slowly trickling out of energy.

Like many smart devices, my phone has an alarm to tell me when the battery is low. I suspect this drains a lot of the remaining energy from the battery in order to fulfill its prophecy more quickly, but normally I might consider it a useful feature. Right now, however, at 2am, I've discovered that the usability engineers at Motorola designed this feature not as an alert, but as a behavior-modification tool. Make the punishment for forgetting to plug in the phone painful enough, and I won't do it again.

Everyone has had the experience of incorporating external stimulus into the story of their dreams. The sound of a baby crying might be transformed into the sound of a jazz singer at a club. The sound of the alarm clock might become a fire engine racing to a burning building. Motorola's alarm, however, cannot be wrapped into any storyline. The moment I hear it, no matter how deeply I might be sleeping, I'm immediately aggravated and awake. It has the same two tones as a doorbell, but instead of that cheerful resonance and sustain -- a sound full of promise -- it sounds sharp and impatient. The phone is annoyed.

NIGHTMARE NOISES. If I could just get up and turn it off I could do so half asleep and drift back into my dreams. And I wouldn't be writing this column. But the Motorola alarm only rings once every 4 minutes, and I have no idea where the phone is hiding.

Ahem.

Vile corporate sleep disrupters, ye who would subordinate me to a gadget, death to you all!

My thanks to Christopher Kenton (president of Cymbic and director of Touchpoint Metrics) for writing this post and helping me get back to sleep.....