School Starts At 7:00 AM / Me At 6:99 AM

Submission 8,586

Part of a series on TikTok. [View Related Entries]

About

School Starts At 7:00 AM / Me At 6:99 AM refers to a series of POV videos and phrasal templates depicting people's reactions when they are late to school. The phrase is most commonly captioned with the purposely wrong time "6:99 A.M" instead of "6:59 A.M," and often accompanied by videos featuring animals sleeping. The meme format was popularized on TikTok in August 2022, inspiring other meme content related to wrong time usage.

Origin

The first post available using the wrong time (6:99 AM) format comes from the Brazilian TikTok^[1] user @claudiofariias, dating back to November 3rd, 2021. The video is a comedy skit in which he uses the overlay texts (in Portuguese) "school starts at 7 AM" and "me at 6:99 AM." The video garnered 709,000 plays and 131,300 likes in two years (seen below).

Spread

The phrasal template in Portuguese became popular around August 2022 with Brazilian TikTok^[2] users before spreading to a global audience. For example, @kittyyurimeamea posted a video of a Capybara taking a bath with the overlay texts in Portuguese "school starts at 7 AM" and "me at 6:99 AM." The video (seen below) received 10,900 plays and 1,200 likes in a year.

On January 14th, 2023, TikTok^[3] user @luffy.editor90 shared a video of a dog sleeping with an alarm sounding and the overlay texts "school starts at 8 AM" and "me at 7:99." The video received 5.7 million plays and 844,200 likes in three months (seen below).

A few days after the original video gained virality, other variations of the "me at 6:99 AM" meme appeared on TikTok. The sound^[4] of the video accumulated 4,400 other videos uploaded on the platform, as of March 2023. For example, on January 17th, 2023, TikTok^[5] user @onlypill posted the overlay text "school starts at 7:00" on top of a video of a kitty sleeping heavily. The post (seen below, left) garnered 6.2 million plays and 964,400 likes in three months. Four days later, TikTok^[6] user @333chrstmaz shared a video of a dog sleeping with the overlay texts "the bus gets here at 8 AM" and "me at 7:99AM." The post (seen below, right) received 6.7 million plays and 982,700 likes in three months.