Snooze Penalty

I, like many people, use my mobile telephone as an alarm clock. I also have difficulty getting up early, so make regular use of the snooze function to gain myself 30 or more extra minutes of sleep. This is a bad habit, as it just results in having to rush more, skip breakfast etc., and generally end up feeling worse. So far so mundane.

This morning, in a state somewhere between sleep and wake, in a kind of lucid dream, I got the impression that I was being charged £10 for each time I used the snooze function to “buy” myself 10 more minutes. This woke me up pretty quickly.

Then it occurred to me that this is entirely feasible. Admittedly it would be voluntary and self-imposed, but for those who want to break the habit of sleeping on borrowed time, the phone could be set up to deduct a small charge (£2 or thereabouts) from your phone bill or balance each time. The bill would show something like “SNOOZE PENALTY 06-APRIL-2004 £2.00”. The temptation would obviously be to wake up, turn the function off, reset the alarm and drift off again. But this could be made a long and drawn-out process, involving entering a PIN that’s written on a piece of paper in another room.

I’m pretty sure that just removing the snooze function wouldn’t achieve the same effect. For those who legitimately set their alarm half an hour early then use snooze to ease themselves into the day can be accommodated by starting the penalty after the 3rd time. But then they probably don’t need help.

(Acknowledgement to “Exploding Alarm Clock”, more extreme means to the same end)