Honestly, I have always felt that Coffee is overrated. I mean, what is so special? Almost everyone uses it these days during exam periods or when they have a scary test they have to do ‘TDB’ for. Even the sellers are always happy during these periods because their sales tend to increase triple fold. Thanks to Mr. Coffee.


I don’t like conventional things. I mean, why should I take it just because others are taking it? If the sleep wants to ‘carry’ me, let it do so. After all, ‘I cannot come and go and kill myself’. Besides, I never believed it really worked because of an experience I had in my second year in secondary school. I wanted to read for a test. So I prepared hot coffee, added milk and sugar to sweeten. Then I relaxed on my bed to read while sipping my sweet hot coffee. My dear friends, I slept off halfway through the coffee. That was the last time my Digestive apparatus came in contact with Mr.Coffee.

Life has a way of hitting you hard such that things you swore you would never do or go back to, you find yourself doing them again. A ‘stuffy’ medical student once said, “the fear of Pathology and Pharmacology is the beginning of wisdom”. As my part 2 exams were drawing nearer this year, I noticed that the weather was getting too cold. My bed felt softer and more cozy. My urge for eating beans for supper everyday was increasing and I was eating it. In short, I was sleeping too much. What made it worse was the fact that I was not so bothered. Some of my friends said it was probably forces from the village. I dismissed it. After all, my heart was willing, the brain was just weak. Another weird thing was that people were telling me that I was losing weight. They even went as far as teasing me that it was too much of reading that was making me so pale and thin.(Haa..haa.haa..They don’t know what is going on) I was always confused as to whether to be happy or sad about that comment.
So I decided to employ the help of Mr. Coffee to help stay awake. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures. I bought a sachet of Coffee that Friday evening. Voila! I read through that night!! I couldn’t believe it. If such magic could happen in the Life of a Jonah like me earlier, I would have been buzzing with stuff by that time. So I continued drinking my coffee and reading every night until a friend of mine met me and told me “My dear, it’s all in your head. Coffee doesn’t keep you awake. It’s just Psychology. You took it, you expect it to keep you awake and so you stayed awake”. I wondered. That could actually be true. So the following night, I told myself it was all in my head, that I didn’t need Coffee, that I would just imagine that I took it and I would stay awake. I opened my laptop and sat on the table to read. My vibe was high. I opened the slide. Page 1…page 2…page…pag…pa…p…To make things worse, I was reading in my dream. I would not have been so angry if I could remember any of the things I read in my dream when i woke up. I was so angry I marched ferociously down to my friend’s room the next morning to beat him up, but he was not around.

I decided to go back to my coffee. It worked again and I read through the night. Then I concluded that it was coffee afterall,not my Psychology. I continued that way till the end of my exams. Though my head ached a lot of times, I managed to scale through.
In conclusion, Coffee may work for me, but it may not work for you. It may not have worked then, but it may work now. The prime thing is for you to find the best way to stay awake. Mine was Coffee during my examinations, somebody else used movies to stay awake (Though I cannot dare try that one, else I would get carried away). Just find yours, and you will be fine.

Written by: Jummai Sadiku