What alarm do you have at work/school

[wiley209]

@TrueAlert Speaker/Strobe

I forgot to mention that the clocks at Belmont High are also Simplex. All of them are square and there are two types. The older ones are silver and the newer ones are white. They all have a second hands. Thank god they don’t make the annoying click every minute like the ones at middle school did. Those look like the ones at the high school except without a second hand and made the click every minute. You won’t notice the click if you’re paying attention to something else, but if you do notice it, it can get annoying. Anyone ever been around those clocks?

Do the clocks by chance happen to look like THIS?

I know those Simplex clocks VERY well. I’ve seen them at practically every school I’ve attended, except for my junior high school, which had these older unknown clocks (probably IBM or National Time, the school bells were 6-inch Edwards Adaptabels and these unknown single-stroke chimes, and the time control panel was a Simplex model installed after they renovated the wood shop class in the early 1990s). But both my elementary schools and my high school had these clocks (they still do; some of them don’t work).

As far as the clocks making noise go, at the school I attended for grades 1-6, a few of them had really soft buzzers in them for class-change (the regular bells didn’t work), and it was interesting how the clock system was Simplex, yet the fire alarm system was Gamewell (older Flexalarm panel with Fire-Lite 450 horns). The K-8 school where I had kindergarten as well as summer camp back in 2000 had these clocks too, but they didn’t make any sound, since the bells (6-inch Simplex bells) were loud enough that putting buzzers or whatever in the clocks was completely unneccesary.

At my high school, a couple of the clocks acted a little screwey. In the room where my brother and friends and I had our social skills class, sometimes the clock would start making this weird humming/buzzing sound, and would sometimes go for a minute before stopping. Since it didn’t sound for three seconds, it surely wasn’t a class-change buzzer (we had a tone on the PA system that took care of that). And in another classroom where I sometimes had study hall, as well as for an after-school mentoring program on some days, their clock was REALLY bizzare. Not only were the hands painted red and green, but usually when the minute hand would reach the “6” during the half-hour point, then the clock would get stuck. On top of the hour, the clock would then fix itself (it would start moving 30 seconds before the hour would strike, then when the minute hand would reach “12,” it would click and then go back to normal position). At these three schools, a few of the clocks don’t work anymore, but others still do. And only some of them had second hands, while others didn’t.

I’ve also seen these clocks at the elementary school a few of our friends went to. There was also one in the main lobby at South Junior High School (obviously a later installation, the rest of the clocks were older IBM models, the bell system was IBM and the fire alarm system was Edwards). But that’s gone now, it was replaced with a newer Simplex clock and PA speaker combo (they’ve since replaced the old IBM clocks and bells with a new Simplex clock system with a tone sounding on the PA system for class change, and the old Edwards fire alarm system got replaced with a Simplex 4100U voice-evac fire alarm system).

The college I attend originally had those Simplex clocks in the buildings that were originally built in 1978 (the Liberal Arts, Humanities, Fine Arts, Field House and Administration buildings). However, most of them are now gone. In most cases they left nothing there (usually they plate over the holes, but in some the holes and wiring are still there!), but a few other places on campus had battery-operated clocks put in place of the old Simplex clocks. They told me that the clocks were taken out years ago for two reasons:

1. There was a thunderstorm years ago where lightning struck the school, causing a power surge and causing all the clocks to permanently stop working.
2. The students in the classrooms would often spend more time looking at the clocks instead of listening to the teacher or whatever.

That pic I took is of the non-working Simplex clock in the Little Theater in the Fine Arts building. There is also one in the theater shop in that building, there’s one in the bleacher areas of the gym in the Field House building, one in the swimming pool and another in the mens’ visitors team locker room (both also in the Field House building) and one in the office of one of my teachers in the Liberal Arts building (he put a battery-operated clock underneath it).