Sleep is such a beautiful thing. I am especially fond of sleeping well after the rooster crows. Unfortunately, due to the scheduling problems I mentioned a couple weeks ago, there is only one day per week that I can sleep in.

On this day that I like to call “Wednesday,” I don’t want anything to wake me up. I can’t think of a thing, except for the cable going out during a Vikings game, that upsets me more than getting prematurely woken up.

Phone calls are by far the worst way to get jarred awake. When the phone rings at my place early in the morning, somebody I know better be near death. And by near death, I mean they better not be dead yet because if they were, they could have waited until noon to give me a call.

Also, they better not be calling me about one of those weird distant relatives I’ve never met. If it’s not someone I know really well, like my mom or dad — and possibly my brother and sisters if I wasn’t up too late the night before — I don’t need to hear about it until lunchtime.

But Wednesday morning is always when those punk credit card companies decide to give me a call:

“Hello, my name is Tamara calling on behalf of Visaexpresstercard to inform you that you have been pre-approved for our new gold card with no annual fee and a low APR because we know you are a dumb, irresponsible college student who will forget to pay your bills and will eventually owe us so much money that we will legally be able to kidnap your entire family and force them to labor in salt mines until your debt has been worked off. We have all of your personal information including your address, social security number, bank accounts, shoe size, the number of times you wet your bed as a child and the location of the Go-Bot watch your grandpa gave you for being the ring bearer in his wedding that you lost in the third grade. If you can verify this information with a simple grunt, we will have your new Visaexpresstercard sent to you within five to seven days.”

A simple solution to preventing these early morning phone calls would be to just take the phone off the hook. But that would not defeat the greater evil: Relentless Credit Card Companies. Using phone taps and surveillance cameras that I’m pretty sure these companies have hidden in my room, they would easily be able to detect that my phone is off the hook.

Once they discover this, they would probably send someone all in black clothing to sneak into my room late at night and reconnect my phone. Either that or early one morning they might choose to have someone rappel from the roof of my building, crash through my window, throw a bunch of pamphlets with amazing credit card offers at me and escape back through the window via jet pack.

There is nothing the credit card companies can do that would surprise me. I’m almost 100 percent certain that they have an entire team of people, using code names like Snake and Weaselbutt who have dedicated their lives to signing me up for major credit cards.

Using a multi-billion dollar satellite tracking system, the team leader watches my every move and give the orders to his team:

“Ok people, Skinny (that’s their code name for me) is on the move. He’s leaving Friley, headed northeast towards the library. Poochy and Snake, see if you can get a credit card booth set up by the Hub. Give away John Belushi T-shirts or something, just get his attention!”

“Lefty, go in his room and put his phone back on the hook. Weaselbutt, get in his mailbox and take out all those birthday cards and replace them with credit card offers. I want a full report at 1400 hours.”

I’m sure there are many of you readers who are experiencing similar treatment and want to see an end to it. On Friday I called one of these credit card companies to try and rattle a few cages. It took me a while before I could talk to a real person, but after a series of button pushings I eventually talked to a credit card employee we’ll call “Sandra.”

I told Sandra I was on to their little plan and I knew all about the phone taps and the satellite surveillance.

Her reaction may shock you. She said she had no idea what I was talking about and acted as if I was the one who was crazy.

So ignorance is their little game. But don’t let her fool you. She’s probably already reported this to her superiors who are “taking care of it.”

As you read this, the DPS scuba team is probably on their latest adventure, pulling my body, wrapped in a potato sack and sporting a new pair of cement boots, out of Lake LaVerne.

These credit card companies are trying to milk vulnerable college students. Fight the urge to get free crappy T-shirts and can cozies because the credit card game never ends. You can always upgrade to gold or platinum or moon rock.

I want you to know that I’m taking a stand. From now on, instead of credit cards, I’m carrying cash — and lots of it. And for you muggers out there looking for a quick buck, I don’t look anything like my picture.

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Peter Borchers is a sophomore in advertising from Bloomington, Minn. He’s just upset that he had a $25 late fee on his bill last month.