This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Happy New Year, beautiful nerds.

It is now the impossibly futuristic sounding 2025, and we are ringing in the new year with our 20th edition of many stories, featuring tales about Cold War neon signs, Japanese fire escapes, the marvels of Smelovision, but first,

we must wake up from our holiday slumber. Brace yourselves.

I live in a house with seven other people. I'm going to let that sink in for a second.

That is a lot of humans under one roof with a lot of different schedules,

which means a lot of alarms going off anywhere from 6 a.m. to, I don't know, 10 a.m.

There's the one that's like, but it goes for like an hour because it doesn't actually wake anyone up.

And then the one that really, really gets me is the duck.

Now, everyone has their own way of waking up.

Personally, I don't really need an alarm because the fear, dread, and obligation of middle age keeps my consciousness right at the

edge of alert at all times. But in my house, this morning chorus of quacks and bird songs exist

because almost everyone sets their alarms early, often much earlier than they actually need to get up.

And that's because they are building in time to

abuse the worst feature of their alarm, a feature so cursed and diabolical. It defeats the very

purpose of any alarm. I'm talking, of course, about the snooze button. The snooze button is a bad

solution to a conundrum that's existed for millennia.

People need to sleep, but they also have things to do.

In ancient Greece, Plato jolted himself out of bed with a system where a set amount of water

slowly dripped into an airtight pot until the pressure was so high it would let out a piercing sound,

kind of like a teapot.

...