Every college student - or any human being, rather - knows the struggle of waking up to an alarm every morning. The invention of the snooze button prevents an alarm from its actual purpose of waking you up at the time you actually need to be awake, but instead allows you to procrastinate the activity you need to be doing, the purpose many recent technologies were invented for. One student’s experience demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on such a button, so graciously shared with Cardinal Correspondents as a cautionary tale.
Becky Badgir was peacefully slumbering in her apartment last Wednesday morning when her alarm went off. Tempting fate by not opening an eye, she grabbed for her cell phone, pressed Snooze, and settled herself back among the pillows for “ten more minutes”. Tragically, she had pressed Turn Off, and would cause a panic never before seen on this campus.
Three days later, Badgir was blinking herself awake on what she believed to be the same sunny, cloudless spring day, feeling incredibly well rested, when the Madison PD broke down her bedroom door. Apparently, her flatmates had noticed Badgir hadn’t appeared for three days, and were starting to become concerned. One, who asked to remain anonymous, was still drying her relieved tears when she told the Cardinal, “We assumed she was at her boyfriend’s, but when I never saw her during the day, I got a little worried. I knocked on her door, which was locked, and nobody answered.”
When Badgir’s boyfriend showed up on Friday, saying she had missed date night, the roommates panicked and called the police, believing their roomie to be missing. Meanwhile, Badgir was peacefully sleeping through three days, catching up on sleep that had been lost to hours in the library, getting a high score of 3,000,000 on Subway Surfers, and going out every night until bartime.
Awake now, Badgir cautions her fellow students about the dangers of snooze button dependence. Apparently, the most overwhelming part of her experience was not the MPD knocking down her door and her roommates reporting her as a missing person, but the sheer magnitude of notifications on her phone. “I had, like, 24 snaps and 164 text messages. I lost all my streaks. It sucked.”
