Cambridge, Mass – GlossyNews.com – As if there weren’t enough catastrophes hanging over the world already, Harverford University’s World Crisis Laboratory has identified a brand new threat to planet earth, namely, early risers.
What are early risers? They’re those zombie-like folks seen haunting subway platforms at five and six o’clock in the morning; driving cars with headlights on in the gloom of early winter mornings, even in dense snowstorms; ascending in office building elevators eager to get to their offices at a time of day when normal people are still under covers in warm beds hitting the snooze button on their clock radio for the sixth time.
But what is most disturbing and destabilizing about early risers, says Professor Alvin Woolenheiser of The World Crisis Laboratory, is their almost inhumanly sunny dispositions, chirpiness, and enthusiasm at very early hours of the workday morning. “These people cast a shroud of shallow cheerfulness over what should be a time of profound stupor in the American workplace,” says Wollenheiser.
“Imagine the morale effect of dragging yourself into your office at 8 AM hoping for a private conference consisting of you and a cup of coffee and maybe a gluten-laced donut, and instead finding yourself face-to-face with a crowd of early risers who’ve been there since 7 AM or earlier. Equally disgusting, they’re all wide-awake, full of vim and vigor, and expect you to be the same.”
What’s especially alarming is that early risers are spreading, says Woolenheiser. “During the recent recession, early riser syndrome, as we call it, affected more and more people nationwide and worldwide, apparently eager to protect their jobs from other early risers. It has reached crisis proportions in the U.S. already.”
Wollenheiser predicts that at its present rate of advance, drastic societal effects are inevitable. For example, Denny’s may stop serving breakfast after 10 AM. Lunch hours could start as early as 10:30 AM. It could become impossible to get a Big Mac after nine at night.
“The writing’s on the wall,” says Wollenheiser. “It’s like a replay of Body Snatchers. Right now, these people are in the minority, but in a few years, if you’re not one of them, you could wake up one morning very early in your bed and find a cold hand on your shoulder and one of these people staring down at you. It could happen. Believe it. They’re taking us over, one by one, and there’s no going back.”
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