Notifications on iOS are awful. I really want certain kinds of notifications (specifically calendar appointments) to bug me until I acknowledge them. Instead,

Notifications on iOS are awful. I really want certain kinds of notifications (specifically calendar appointments) to bug me until I acknowledge them. Instead, they trigger once, and if I happen to be off in deep concentration on a programming issue, I miss them entirely. Everything else I tend to disable, but it's a huge disconnect between how I think something should work and what actually happens in the real world. Meanwhile I get a notification right after paying for something using NFC. Why??? This makes no sense.