Past, present, and future tenses are something that was beaten into me by my teachers. Mrs. Catch had an absolutely ferocious glare she could turn on you if you used the wrong tense. In grade four, she was the god we all feared... with the ability to reduce us to small quivering lumps of protoplasm simply by raising one eyebrow. With luck, she is now entombed in steel lined concrete somewhere. Thinking about it, it should be fairly easy to trace her using a geophone. Just listen for a buried jet, because the way English is mangled everyday in the newspapers, she is surely spinning in her grave like an out of control jet engine.

I find it distracts from a story, indeed, it can ruin a story, when simple grammatical errors exist in a story. Using passed for past, or vice versa, makes me think someone doesn't know English. When I read a line that uses the word waked, it's usually in the wrong context. It 'is' a word, but like you, I'd have to think long and hard to fit it into a sentence. Wake, woke, awaken, awoke, woken, waking, all perfectly valid words. Waked? Duh, maybe as the past tense when talking about a recently deceased Irishman's send-off party...