The day I decided to ruin my life started just like any other. I performed my sacred morning ritual of pressing the snooze button 14 to 25 times and mumbling “five more minutes” every five minutes. Then I finally got out of bed, two hours later than I was supposed to, ready to seize the day.

That was when my long-suffering girlfriend put her foot down. “Arwa”, she said firmly, “this has got to stop.” I detected a murderous undertone to her voice I had never heard before. It was clear that, if I wanted to remain in a happy relationship, the time had come for me to finally overcome my snooze addiction.

Luckily, there’s an app for that. Indeed, there seems to be no end of apps that promise to get the stubborn sleeper out of bed in weird and decidedly-not-wonderful ways. I downloaded them all.

The Great Diabolical Alarm Experiment of 2018 had begun. First, I tried one that involves walking a certain number of steps in order to turn the alarm off, followed by an app that makes you spin around to silence it. Both succeeded in making me grumpy, but did not stop me from getting back into bed, exhausted, after I had turned them off.

Then I tried Alarmy, an app that makes you perform a “mission” to shut it up: choices include solving timed maths problems, shaking your phone, and taking a photo of a pre-specified object. Because I am an intellectual, I chose the maths challenge and set the difficulty to “very hard”.

Have you ever tried solving difficult maths questions at an ungodly hour as a timer ticks down, a terrible noise wails in your ear and your partner yells: “Make it stop!”? It got me out of bed all right, but the trauma is still giving me nightmares.