I spend a lot of time busting on other people on this site, so now it’s time I got a taste of my own medicine.
For several months now, I’ve been using the alarm on my iPhone (or as I like to call it, my iPad Nano) to wake me up in the morning. Every morning, things go approximately the same way. The alarm goes off, I fumble for the phone, stare at it for a second, hit the on-screen button that gives me five more minutes of sleep, and instantly pass out again. I do this a few times, then I actually get up. The whole process has worked pretty well–until yesterday.
Yesterday morning, the phone started doing its impersonation of an air raid siren. I fumbled for it on the dresser, looked at it, and–hang on, what’s that? The button on the screen was labeled with an unfamiliar word. I stared at it for a second or two, the alarm still blaring, and vaguely wondered if I’d accidentally changed the language settings on my phone. Was that Russian? Norwegian maybe? Whatever. I hit the button and went back to sleep. About five minutes later, when the phone went off again, I picked it up and started blankly at that word again. I tried sounding it out this time, but it sounded so unfamiliar to me, I still was convinced I’d accidentally changed my phone over to some crazy non-English language.
The third time it went off, I realized, hey, the word “Alarm” is still in English. But under that, there was still that word I couldn’t figure out. I sounded it out again, but… man. It wasn’t happening. No matter how I said it, it just didn’t sound like any word I knew. I was more confused than ever now, but I was also still super tired. So off to dreamland I went one last time. Finally, the fourth time the alarm went off, I was able to wake up enough to clear most of the fog from my head. I looked at that strange word one last time, tried sounding it out again…
You’ve probably guessed where this is going, right? Yeah, the word was “snooze”. A perfectly good English word. In fact, the same word I’ve been staring at two or three times every weekday morning for the past three months. I was even sounding the word out, pronouncing it correctly even, but I was convinced it was some Norwegian word or something. It couldn’t possibly be English anyhow. Snoooooze. Snooooooooze. WTF? That’s not a word!
Yes it is, asshole. And now I take my place amongst the dummies of the Internets.
Man, don’t feel too bad. I also am stupid as shit when I’m just waking up. Many, many times I’ve been utterly unable to figure out how to stop my alarm clock from beeping, even though I do this five times a week. I’ve also found myself staring at the numbers on the clock and trying to figure out if I’m late for work or not.
Also, since I get up before the sun does, it’s happened that I’ll think I’ve overslept so much it’s gotten dark again, and then I wonder why it’s dark at quarter of five in the evening.