This Here Daylight Needs Saving!

It’s one of two times a year when if you got lazy at some point last year, your clock is possibly right again.

IT’S DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!

You can now spend March through November dreaming of that extra hour of sleep that you just lost, but, shit, that is going to happen during the wee hours of the morning following Halloween which is on a Saturday night. So congratulations, you are going to be hung over and dressed like Gritty or Convenience Store Clerk Frankenstein or the little girl from Stranger Things, but you also made it weird!

Everyone is now looking forward to an entire week of everyone in your office dragging ass and being cranky, but it will be VERY exciting for that one dude who will stand by the window at 5:30pm, repeatedly declaring, “Look how bright it is!” while you are on your fourth cup of coffee and the only sweetener left is a bunch of Swedish Fish you forgot you had in a drawer.

I looked into Daylight Savings Time (barely) to figure out what the deal is. When I was in grade school, I was told repeatedly it was to help farmers. But…I grew up in Philadelphia, so I didn’t give a fuck about farmers. It turns out that a lot of farmers aren’t on board for it either. It actually messes them up with establishing when people should arrive to get work done and their goddamn cows hate it because they are either overdue or not quite ready for their milking. That’s the human equivalent of getting ready to hop in the shower before you had your morning shit and you know things are going to be off.

People advocated for the changing of the clocks for years, but most people felt like if you needed the extra daylight to do your work, you should just get up earlier. The rest of us would continue to use clocks to know what time it, thanks! But during WWI, resource shortages made it somewhat relevant in trying to prevent people from needing light or some shit. War is hell. But so is trying to adjust to a new sleep schedule. After the first Big One, it was repealed. Well, they tried to repeal it at first, but Woodrow Wilson wanted more time for golf, so he vetoed two repeals. The second repeal was overruled and no president ever played golf again.

It was instituted again during WWII for similar reasons and they never took it back. Probably to keep stimulating the economy. When I leave the office and it’s dark outside, I drive home and go DIRECTLY to bed. When it’s sunny out, I just kinda walk around the mall and ask people if they can tell me what time it is because my watch is surely broken.

At least it could possibly help people get over seasonal affective disorder a little early. The extra sun at the end of the day makes a lot of people feel like they have a life to live again and aren’t just grinding it out to pay for the electricity they need to light their homes after a day of work. Having said that, it’s already getting lighter, so this would be coming anyway.

Seems like a dated tradition that we don’t really need anymore. I know that this also comes up twice a year and no one does anything about it. It was probably a little easier to adjust to the change because you would spend an entire day expending energy trying to fix all of the clocks manually. Now I just wake up and my phone did it all for me. Except the one clock with hands in my apartment that someone got me as a gift. It’s some how too simple to change itself, yet too technologically advanced for me to not fuck it up and have to spend 30 minutes making it spin to the right spot, but OH SHIT I went too far again!

Is anyone out there a huge fan of the time change? I would ask you to tell me what I got wrong here, but I already assume it’s most of it.

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