She was recently spotted on an MRT train with a sign that said, "Please wake me up at Sengkang, thank you", drawing both praise and criticism from netizens.
Now, Tan Zi Hui, 20, explained that she did it because she has been oversleeping on the train and missing her stops.
A photo of Ms Tan and her sign was posted on citizen-journalism site Stomp on Tuesday. Her sign even had a side note which said: "If you want to Stomp just Stomp, I'm too sleepy."
The Stomp post garnered more than 31,000 views as of 7.30pm yesterday. Some netizens said she was a "genius" and that she was "thinking out of the box", while others thought she had taken a reserved seat and should not have done so.
One netizen also found it hard to believe that Ms Tan could hold her sign in the position depicted in the photo.
Ms Tan, who graduated from a polytechnic half a year ago, has been working at a restaurant in the Tanjong Pagar area, Shin Min Daily News reported yesterday.
As she ends her work at around 11pm, she always has to hurry to catch the last train.
"Because of my work, every time I board the train, I'm overcome by weariness and fall asleep," she said.
But she has been missing her stop on three to four occasions recently, waking up only at the terminal station, Punggol. She then had to hail a taxi to get back to her home in Sengkang.
Her cab fare came up to about $10, which she thinks is a waste of money. She earns $8 an hour.
She decided to make a sign to ask other commuters to wake her up. "People in Japan have been doing what I did," said Ms Tan, who has been using her sign since Monday.
She managed to wake up in time on Monday to get off at her stop.
But on Tuesday, she would have missed it, if not for a man in his 40s who woke her up when the train was passing through Hougang.
Ms Tan's mother, a 40-year-old housewife, said the criticism that her daughter slept on a reserved seat was not fair.
"She boards the train at a very late hour. There aren't many people on the train, so she wouldn't have inconvenienced other commuters," she said.
Ms Tan added that it is easier to sleep at a corner seat. "But if someone really needs the seat, they can always wake me up."
"I don't think I did anything wrong, so I'll continue doing it," she said, adding that she will not need the sign at the end of the year as she will be switching to a workplace closer to home.
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