The All-nighter (Incomplete)

It’s a common practice among college students. Pulling the all-nighter. Coffee, Mountain Dew, and Red Bull are consumed in mass quantities as the hours tick by. 1 am, 2 am, 3am, and now just 5 more hours to go. That paper won’t finish it-self. Thousands of under-grads across the country spend thousands of hours every year furiously toiling away at their computers while the rest of us sleep. I say “the rest of us” because the all-nighter is a university ritual I’ve so far managed to avoid. Through a combination of semi-careful planning, and a sincere belief that I benefit far more from a full nights rest than from possessing a “complete” assignment, I have always managed to spend my nights in bed, rather than in a desk chair.

The prospect of being forced into the all-nighter has none-the-less loomed heavy on the horizon on several occasions. But here it’s actually my innate laziness that pays off. The act of sleeping-in is sacred to me. Managing to sleep well into the late morning gives one a certain feeling of accomplishment. To ensure that I continue to be able to sleep late, I only sign up for classes that are held latter in the day. When mid-terms and finals roll around, this means that I can sleep 7 to 8 hours, and still have time in the morning for any extra work my classes may require.

I pride myself on my all-nighter avoidance strategy. Its principles are sound and it has served me well through 4 years of school. But last week my perfect record was shattered! You can hardly blame me for not seeing it coming. It’s August. There are no assignments or test or papers. I’m ready for all of that. I’m prepared. What my planning hadn’t anticipated was work. An all-nighter at work? Impossible! Work ends at 6:00pm. I go home, I eat, I sit, I watch, I read, I sleep. I sleep! But not last Friday. That Friday, I worked, I worked, I worked, I worked, and then I think I might have blacked out. At some point, I shut my internal recorders off. And I did all this to fix a motorcycle.