The snooze button is the best part of the world’s most hated gadget

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The alarm clock is the most hated device in the world, because it is the primary purpose of the device and it is so annoying that it can make you want to vomit.

The snooze button is a crucial reprieve, a stay of execution for the day you will inevitably have to face, and it is found in almost all alarm clocks. The phrase is rendered in plastic.

I bought the alarm clock at Walmart in Pennsylvania a decade ago, before I became a sleepaway camp counselor. It has been used for many years in high school, college, and beyond, its red numbers barely diminishing as time goes on. It was made of plastic that used to be white before the passage of time and has been dulled to a dark shade of gray.

:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com.

In those years, the snooze button has been punched and slammed countless mornings, each click granting a few more minutes of silence, just enough time to drift off to sleep before the cycle starts again.

The snooze buttons are the largest on the alarm clock. It is not a button for subtleness, it is a button to be blindly fumbled for in the half-lit twilight of a morning come too early, to be smashed with the unconscious awareness of someone who stayed up too late. The snooze button on my cheap alarm clock has been bouncing back and forth for another day after I tried to destroy it for committing the cardinal sin of waking me up.

The snooze button makes turning off an alarm more deliberate. The easiest way to snooze an alarm clock is through a small button, while disabling it is done through a larger one. The snooze button wants to protect us from our own worst impulses, so it will only let us sleep for another 10 minutes.

:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com.

Even though our alarms have gone digital, it is still a paradigm. The biggest digital button on the lockscreen is the snooze button, while the smaller stop button is tucked away. When an alarm goes off, the physical power button will snooze, even if we don't use it.

Even with a few more minutes of sleep, the snooze button is still a lie because it promises that things can get better. The alarm clock is still a clock, and time only ever runs forward.

Sometimes, a few extra minutes that the snooze button buys can be enough to get your day started on the right foot.

Chaim Gartenberg is a photographer for The Verge.