What is all this Daylight-Saving Time nonsense about?
Whose great idea was it?
Like many of you, I get all discombobulated when this fake change of season rolls around. I learned long ago to “spring forward, fall back,” and I do remember to reset the old school clocks that don’t automatically reset themselves. Oh yes, and change the batteries in the smoke alarms.
But I don’t like the whole idea. It just messes with people, animals, commerce, airline schedules, and probably even plants.
I just read an article by Dave Mosher in The Business Insider that began: “Every year, many writers pen some form of this essay in irritated prose. Yet every year — actually, twice a year — we’re forced to continue partaking in the world’s dumbest ritual.”
See? Others agree!
Daylight-Saving Time (its proper name – not “Savings” as I’ve been saying for years) was created in WWI and implemented in 1942, during WWII, purportedly to decrease energy use, which somehow would make more resources available for the war effort. The thought was, if people don’t wake up in the dark, they won’t need to turn on lights.
OK, but if 12 hours later it gets dark at 5 p.m., I’m going to turn on lights at least an hour earlier than usual. So what’s the difference?
Some have thought DST was designed to make the mornings safer for kids who had to catch school buses in the dark. A great idea, yes, but here in Beaufort County, the kids have to get up Oh-dark-thirty anyway because we have different school start times and we can’t afford to buy more buses.
DST causes all sorts of problems. We are either early or late that first day – usually either for church or coffee with a friend- or even for work the next day.
I remember one time when I was kid, the head deacon at our church didn’t show up to take up the collection at the morning service. He arrived as everyone was leaving the building an hour later. He had forgotten to change his clock.
A former columnist for this paper, Margaret Griffin, wrote a couple of years ago about a change-over time when she worked in a county office in New Jersey. She told how two workers came into her office and reset her clock to 10 a.m. “Unfortunately, it was 2:30 p.m.,” she wrote.
But the workers insisted. They had been told at 9 a.m. to “go around and set all the County clocks to 10 a.m.” It just took a while to get to all of them.
My internal clock, set to whatever natural rhythms it perceives, tends to wake me up at 7:15 a.m. almost every day. For several days in a row, though, I’ve been awakened at 6:15 a.m. instead.
Yes, this was after the time change.
I know my brain was aware of this tomfoolery, but apparently it did not inform my body to adjust. Like always, that will take weeks.
A meme has been floating around social media that highlights the issue for our four-legged friends. In a caption above a photo of two adorable pups, the larger one says, “OK. Explain it again. It feels like five o’clock dinner time, but it’s really four o’clock?”
To which the other pup affirms, “This is BS” (my abbreviation).
I must say, I have to agree with the dogs.
