I Fell Asleep in the Auditorium After Practice and Held Up the Next Team

Before sports day, each department booked the auditorium to practice its cheers. Our slot was from seven to eight in the morning. It was the only time we could coordinate before class, so everyone arrived in matching shirts with sleepy faces.

I was responsible for playing the music and the movement video. Once practice began, I stayed by the speakers and rewound each section whenever we stopped. After hearing the same cheer song dozens of times in an hour, the rhythm continued in my head even after the music stopped.

When practice ended, my friends left to get breakfast. The time before my first class was awkwardly short, and I had no energy left, so I sat in the audience seats. The next team was booked from 8:30, and I thought no one would be around for about twenty minutes.

I set an alarm for fifteen minutes later and used my bag as a pillow. Afraid that a sound would echo through the auditorium, I turned the volume all the way down and buried my phone inside the bag. I thought it was close enough that I would hear it.

The problem was that I had chosen an alarm sound much like the cheer song I had heard for the last hour. Half asleep, I heard music and thought the rehearsal was continuing in a dream. I still do not know whether I turned it off once and went back to sleep, or never heard it at all.

The next sound was far louder. After a microphone was tapped, someone counted “one, two,” and the voice spread through the auditorium. When I opened my eyes, students from another department were on the stage and equipment bags filled the aisle by the seats.

The clock read 8:35. As I jumped up, I dropped the water bottle in my bag. The plastic bottle rolled loudly across the empty auditorium, and several people looked over at once.

A student from the next team said they had assumed our department was still practicing. Because I was asleep with my bag and cables left on the seats, their sound person had waited to make sure the room had really been handed over.

I explained that practice was over and only I had fallen asleep, then gathered my things. One charging cable had slipped beneath a seat and would not come out easily. While everyone else got ready, the time I spent feeling along the floor seemed unusually long.

By the time I got outside, I was rushing for my first class too. Running across campus, I realized that the twenty minutes looked empty to me, but to the next team they were setup time for bringing in equipment and adjusting the sound. I had been wrong to think only the reservation’s start time mattered.