Over the past few months there has been widespread confusion about how the government’s system to control the spread of COVID-19 actually works, or if it even exists at all outside of our imaginations. When some of us felt that we were finally grasping the basics of what it means to be in Tier Two or Tier Three, the government suddenly introduced another new tier, carving up another fresh layer of hell. In the end, as we all know, the government finally decided to scrap this tiered system and replace it with a good old-fashioned lockdown. But, did you know that there’s a tier system for students as well?

Tier One: Your coursework is not due for weeks and yet you’ve already started planning for it. You lie back in your armchair, flicking through videos on Instagram, sipping a strong glass of milk - not because you want to, but because you need some way to kill the time while you wait for the rest of your peers to catch up with you.

Tier Two: It turns out there are less days in a month than you thought. Time is ticking away and you’ve made little progress in the last few days. You limit yourself to four hours of Netflix a day in the hope that this will spur you into action. Then you extend this back to five hours as a reward for your diligence.

Tier Three: Time is passing like a Hollywood montage where the calendar days seem to just fly off the wall. You sit at your keyboard and will yourself to write but you’ve forgotten what a ‘sentence’ is. The rules of grammar and punctuation have become meaningless and you wander through the boundaries of language like Sandra Bullock in Gravity.

Tier Four: People at the library are starting to stare as you grab books off the shelf and try to transfer the knowledge from the pages to your brain through osmosis. Your friends are telling you to chill out and just type up the notes you’ve made, but you realise your notes are longer than the articles they’re meant to summarise. You wish you could cathartically throw your notes into the fire, but they’re all digital and you don’t have a fireplace.

Tier Five: You go to the shop and buy a few cans of Red Bull, thinking all you need is a bit of extra energy - you’re just low on sleep. The caffeine kicks in and you start typing faster than the speed of light. The typing on your keyboard is so intense and vociferous, your neighbours think an earthquake might be coming from your room. You look up from your keyboard, your hands trembling with excitement and caffeine overdose, only to see you’ve just typed “HELP ME” a hundred times across the screen.

Tier Six: Today’s the day. You’re going to stay up all night if you have to because the assignment is due tomorrow. The clock strikes midnight, and you know this is when the magic starts. This is when divine intervention takes hold and you somehow finish your coursework. Why is it taking so long? You’re exhausted but you fuel yourself through the rest of the night with self-resentment, thinking back to your calm, smug Tier-One self and loathing them with every fibre of your being. Sunlight starts to sift through the curtains and the task of editing whatever steaming pile of turd you conjured up the night before now awaits you.

Much like the government, we all try to pretend Tiers One and Two are enough to prevent absolute mayhem from breaking out but, before we know it, the proverbial toilet paper starts flying off the shelves because we know that Tier Six is just around the corner. No matter. You’d rather live on the edge, taking life as it comes, than organise your life and stop procrastinating. You chose this life a long time ago, and it’s too late to turn back now. Others may skate through life with their colour-coded binders, digital reminders and frequent calendar updates, but you are the one who truly knows what it is to be alive.