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No Snooze Is Good Snooze
Jan. 7th, 2016 02:30 amI'm sure whoever invented the snooze alarm thought they were doing humanity a favor, but much like the escalator and the pancake-wrapped sausage on a stick, this creation ends up doing way more harm than any possible good that may have originally been envisioned.
It's a vile construct that exchanges 9 minutes of false promises for each half-asleep stumble you take to blindly smack at the thing. Your subconscious is notoriously a terrible haggler, and it's willing to make that exchange because it believes the - again, 9 minutes - of extra sleep are worth the trouble.
But your subconscious, let's call it Subby for short, forgot to factor in a few things.
First up, there's the cost of extraction. Being pulled out of the sleep state, particularly if you're on a nice REM trip, is a traumatic experience. And not just because you won't get to enjoy the endless room full of nakedness, cake, or whatever it was you were dreaming about (naked cake?). It's just generally an unpleasant event every time you have to wake up when your body isn't ready to. And let's face it, if you were ready to get up, you wouldn't be using an alarm clock.
Secondly, that 9 minutes of sleep isn't the kind of blissful, comfortable sleep that Subby bargained for. It's the shitty kind. It's the kind you get when you were woken up a few minutes ago by a noise that sounds like somebody hitting a baby with a cat.
And if you're like me, your subconscious makes that bargain over and over, because it's too stupid to remember how shittily it worked out when he did it 9 minutes ago. I have literally spent 3 hours on a Sunday afternoon getting up every 9 minutes to hit that fucking snooze alarm. And then I wonder why I feel like shit later in the day.
So what do you do about a problem like the snooze alarm? You could say, “Well, screw that thing! I'm not going to use it anymore. I quit!” Right?
Not so easy. Old Subby is not the type that readily accommodates change. Even if you're able to regain enough consciousness to resist the urge to set that snooze alarm and just get up, you end up losing the battle when it comes to escaping the call of the covers, and that can be even more disastrous than signing up for another 9 minutes of sleep blueballs.
Ultimately you're left with getting a clock with no snooze, prying the button off with a screwdriver, or just not giving a shit and sleeping until you damn well feel like it. And while a lot of us would choose option C, it doesn't sound very good when your boss asks you why you're late for work.
It's a vile construct that exchanges 9 minutes of false promises for each half-asleep stumble you take to blindly smack at the thing. Your subconscious is notoriously a terrible haggler, and it's willing to make that exchange because it believes the - again, 9 minutes - of extra sleep are worth the trouble.
But your subconscious, let's call it Subby for short, forgot to factor in a few things.
First up, there's the cost of extraction. Being pulled out of the sleep state, particularly if you're on a nice REM trip, is a traumatic experience. And not just because you won't get to enjoy the endless room full of nakedness, cake, or whatever it was you were dreaming about (naked cake?). It's just generally an unpleasant event every time you have to wake up when your body isn't ready to. And let's face it, if you were ready to get up, you wouldn't be using an alarm clock.
Secondly, that 9 minutes of sleep isn't the kind of blissful, comfortable sleep that Subby bargained for. It's the shitty kind. It's the kind you get when you were woken up a few minutes ago by a noise that sounds like somebody hitting a baby with a cat.
And if you're like me, your subconscious makes that bargain over and over, because it's too stupid to remember how shittily it worked out when he did it 9 minutes ago. I have literally spent 3 hours on a Sunday afternoon getting up every 9 minutes to hit that fucking snooze alarm. And then I wonder why I feel like shit later in the day.
So what do you do about a problem like the snooze alarm? You could say, “Well, screw that thing! I'm not going to use it anymore. I quit!” Right?
Not so easy. Old Subby is not the type that readily accommodates change. Even if you're able to regain enough consciousness to resist the urge to set that snooze alarm and just get up, you end up losing the battle when it comes to escaping the call of the covers, and that can be even more disastrous than signing up for another 9 minutes of sleep blueballs.
Ultimately you're left with getting a clock with no snooze, prying the button off with a screwdriver, or just not giving a shit and sleeping until you damn well feel like it. And while a lot of us would choose option C, it doesn't sound very good when your boss asks you why you're late for work.
