There are important facets of life that tend to annoy the hell out of us. Now don’t worry, I’m not going into what lives do or do not matter (that came out so wrong, but I’m leaving it). I’m sure somewhere in this paper you could find something of more substance, but I mostly do reviews of crappy food. No, today I will be comparing cops to something else that catches me falling asleep when I really shouldn’t be: alarm clocks.

Just think about it for a second. Say you wake up at seven every morning. You set your alarm and one of two things is going to happen.

The first is your alarm goes off. “Walking on Sunshine” does its impression of nails on a chalkboard. It’s like a 21st century rooster, except more annoying because at the least the rooster doesn’t necessarily sound happy about waking up its future killer. You then do an impression of the rooster post-poultry punishment and run like a chicken with its head cut off turn off the alarm.

“How dare it?” you demand to know. “Does it not know what kind of dream I was having? I mean, I’ve already forgotten, but I remember it being pretty sweet,” you explain, yearning for what was probably the time of your life, maybe. Sort of.

The alarm clock cries a single tear, for it only does what it was born to do. Getting pulled over by a cop is a pretty similar scenario.

“Who does this jack wagon think he is?” you wonder. “Why does he have to ticket me?”

Well, because it’s his job and you were speeding or texting or watching a feature length film on your phone with headphones in. We’ve all been there. But it doesn’t make that the cop’s fault. Sucks he chose you, but not really unfair.

Now for the second scenario: your alarm clock doesn’t go off. Anarchy. Mayhem. Panic in the streets. Well, mostly me panicking, but I am in the street at this point brushing my teeth and putting my pants on simultaneously. That alarm clock would be found later on the floor with a few extra chips in the plastic. It sits there pondering what it did wrong. You got so mad when it woke you up, it thought it would just let you sleep in. You seemed to be so happy when you were asleep. Now you seem like a lot of things, none of them happy.

Now imagine if the cops decided to take a day off. I’d be in full “Purge” level lock down. I’d personally be at the McDonald’s behind Niskanen with my head under the milkshake machine, but we all have priorities.

So what it all boils down to is you may not like them, but they are necessary. No matter how you feel about cops as a whole, just try to remember they are human beings doing their job. Some of them are jerks, but hey, every occupation has some jerks. Some waiters spit in food. Some deliverymen see “fragile” as “throw a little harder for good measure.” Some writers will take an issue people are legitimately dying over and make a stupid analogy for some cheap laughs. Excuse me while I whistle nonchalantly.