By Noamme Elisha. Illustration by Kirsten Miranda

7:45 am, the snooze alarm rings for the 15th time and you finally drag yourself out of bed. Rise and shine, sunshine, it’s a new morning and you’ve got the most exciting art history class waiting for you at 9 am. Leave the comforts of the warm bed, trudge to the bathroom, brush your teeth and glance at the mirror.

You look like a grade-A morning-zombie, but no worries, it’s nothing that can’t be solved with a shower. And just as you get comfortable with the sprinkling water and shampoo in your hair, you hear the loudest, most awful, apocalyptic noise in the world. It’s fire alarm season!

Leaving cookies in the oven for too long or putting a fork in the microwave will most certainly turn on the fire alarms, and are definitely legitimate reasons to have the entire building hate you. It’s no fun walking down sixteen flights of stairs with soap in your hair and wearing next-to-nothing.

It takes about five minutes to get everyone out of the building and across the street, so the firemen can go up and investigate exactly why someone decided it would be a good idea to incinerate breakfast omelets.

The corporate day has already begun on State Street, which is full of people hustling and bustling, then briefly stopping to try to figure out why there are 500 kids in colorful pajamas on the sidewalk.

A tourist bus turns on Randolph, and the passengers take out their cameras: “Look, Margie, look at all those funny lookin’ kids in their bathrobes, what a strange bunch,” and thus, our washed out faces become part of their Chicago Trip photo album.