CAN WE PLEASE GET RID OF THE SNOOZE BUTTON

When I was a kid, I remember watching some Saturday evening stand-up comedy show. I was probably 7 years old, sitting there thinking I had just witnessed the peak of human intelligence.

The joke was about camouflage planes.

“Why do we camouflage planes? Hey look, it’s a flying forest. Don’t shoot.”

That was gold in my eyes and to 7-year-old me, that was the funniest thing ever said!

I thought about that joke for months. I probably repeated it 400 times, even adding my own twist: why don’t we paint them blue with clouds?

Then one day I told it at school, and one of my grade school teachers, who was very much a military strongman type, had to step in and ruin it with facts.

He was like, “Actually, during Vietnam, the green camouflage paint was used for planes when they were on the ground so they could blend in.”

Okay, that makes sense.

Today, I guess the gray planes they use now are some kind of all-purpose camouflage or low-visibility thing. I’m not researching it past a quick Google search, so let’s move on.

But the camo planes and how useless I thought it was got me thinking about that routine the other day, and how something that stupid and simple stuck with me forever. That was probably the first time I realized you could just talk about useless stuff and make people laugh.

Which brings me to the snooze button, which might be one of the dumbest inventions.

Think about it.

You say, “Okay, I have to be up at 7:00, so you set your alarm for 7:00”, but you already know you’re not getting up at 7:00.

You know it. Your phone knows it. Even your cat knows it.

You are setting that alarm for 7:00 just so you can hit snooze and have it go off again at 7:09, and then you hit it again.

Now it’s 7:18.

Can we just fucking set the alarm for 7:18?