or breaking it if falls on the floor, I've put it in a colorful padded pouch that I lay on top of the radio so I always know where it is (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a "remote", doesn't it? The radio is on the headboard, just inches away from my head, but I have to twist my body into an awkward position in order to reach it.

When the alarm goes off in the morning, I have to (while still semi-conscious), pull the remote out of its pouch, turn on a light so I can see the tiny little buttons on it, and then push them in the correct sequence to do what I need to do. This is hard since I don't normally wear my glasses to bed. My usual routine is to turn off the alarm, turn the radio on, lower the volume (I need a real blast to wake me up, but once I'm awake I don't need high volume) so I can listen to the news while I lie in bed stretching my creaky old muscles until I get up, and then I need to turn off the light. The buttons to do this on the old radio were big, and I could find them in the dark, by feel. The remote buttons are tiny, labeled with extremely fine print or completely cryptic icons, and the remote is shaped so that you can't tell which direction its pointing unless the light is on.

Engineers are such flaming assholes.