The Pun Also Rises(as seen in the North Adams Transcript)
"No Snooze Is Good Snooze" So, the other morning I was
supposed to meet a friend for brunch at eleven. (As opposed to brunch
at Eleven, which is a restaurant at Mass MoCA that isn't actually
open at eleven, which I find terribly inconvenient because if you
can't meet someone at Eleven at eleven, then what the heck is the
point of naming your restaurant that? But I digress.) However, when my alarm actually went off the next morning, I hit the snooze button and went back to bed. By the time I actually woke up, after a quick dream about ninjas who were throwing food at me, I was late. But I figure this experience isn't in vain if I can get a column out of it, so let's examine the snooze button. (Okay, it's a tiny button. But let's examine why it exists.) We have this device called an alarm, which was invented so you can choose when you want to wake up, and have it wake you up at that moment. Simple enough. Now there's the snooze button, which was invented so that when the alarm wakes you up -- doing so precisely when you've asked it to so that you can get somewhere on time -- you can ignore the alarm and just fall back to sleep. This just seems like a really bad invention to me. The only conceivable use of the snooze alarm is to allow the Morning You to have more control over your life than the Evening You. And this is precisely what we need to avoid. Let me use myself as an example. Evening Seth is a fairly intelligent person. He does all of my writing, enjoys socializing with friends, and before going to bed often considers the following day's schedule and plans out what time he will need to wake up. Morning Seth, on the other hand, is not terribly bright, and sometimes incapable of forming complete sentences. While Evening Seth could probably write a few hundred pages about his goals and dreams, Morning Seth's ethos can be summed up in three words: "ME WANT SLEEP." So, left to their own devices, Evening Seth would think and plan for every tomorrow, and Morning Seth would ignore these plans and sleep. But Evening Seth has a clever device called an "alarm", which he sets out like a trap next to the bed. When the next day arrives, Morning Seth says "ME WANT SLEEP," but the alarm goes off with a horrible noise and this sleep-wanting thought is soon driven out of his head by the new important goal, "ME NOT WANT BEEP." Morning Seth has to wake up to make the beeping stop, and then since he's already awake, he goes to work. That's what makes our economy function. Unfortunately, the snooze button defeats the alarm by making it entirely useless. It's like having a book of fireproof matches that could almost catch fire, but that might be dangerous, so they don't. The snooze alarm almost wakes you up, but that might interrupt your sleep, so it doesn't. It allows the Morning You to achieve both sleep and not-beep with one quick swat of the button. And that's too much power. So my recommendation is that Evening You should fight back. The daytime incarnation thinks it can steal more sleep by installing a snooze alarm, huh? We'll show it; let's see how Morning You likes having no sleep at all. If Evening You stays up really late, Morning You will receive due
punishment for daring to use the sleep alarm. Sure, this might make
you a bit tardy for work, but who cares? Morning You deserved it,
and Evening You had lots of fun. I just hope your boss really likes
Afternoon You.
____________________ Morning Seth Brown doesn't
write much. Evening Seth Brown is a local freelance humor writer
who appears frequently in the Washington Post's Style Invitational,
infrequently in various other publications, and once in book form
-- in his first book "Think You're The Only One?", published
by Barnes & Noble. His Web site is www.RisingPun.com
All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first. |