It’s 6:59 in the morning. Your class doesn’t begin for another three hours and 51 minutes because you were intelligent enough to schedule your courses in a way that would allow you to get an adequate amount of sleep even when you have to stay up for most of the night to do homework. You lay soundlessly on your bed, dreaming one of those dreams that you never want to wake up from. Suddenly, the clock strikes 7 a.m., and the alarm from the other half of the room rings that pesky sound that you’ve grown to hate.

You awake from your beloved dream, and in order to seem like a supportive and loving roommate, you try not to growl or express your distaste as you roll over to ignore the alarm. Knowing that you won’t be able to sleep until your roommate turns off the annoying dings that are ringing through your head, you impatiently wait for it to stop. Unfortunately for you, your roommate is a heavy sleeper, so the alarm pesters you for five minutes before he or she hits the snooze button.

You know it’s the snooze button that your roommate hits because it’s always the snooze button, but there’s still a small part of you that hopes the alarm will not go off again in nine minutes. You try to fall back asleep, but just as you begin to slip into unconsciousness, your nine minutes of peace is over, and the alarm is dinging louder than it was before.

It takes four minutes for your roommate to turn off their alarm, and this time you are sure that you’ll finally be able to sleep in peace for the rest of the morning, but you’re wrong. Last night, your roommate’s homework load was heavy, so she or he is feeling extra tired today, and they hit the snooze button once more.

In the shortest nine minutes of your life, the alarm is ringing for a third time. You audibly groan and stretch. You can feel the bags weighing down your eyes, so you start to pray to a god that you’re unsure if you still even believe in. You beg that whatever divine force is in charge of the universe will grant your roommate with the will to permanently wake up so that he doesn’t hit the snooze button for a fourth time, because you know that if the alarm clock goes off again, then you will jump out of your bed and throw it from the third-storey window where you live.

Finally, they turn off the alarm, and even though you’ve lost almost an hour of the sleep that your schedule promises you, you peacefull lay down and try to force yourself to pick up where you left off in your dream. Knowing that tomorrow will bring another battle between you and your roommate’s alarm clock, you try to get enough sleep now, so that you might not be as exhausted for the next morning.