Saving Daylight For What?

Okay, it’s over and done – and overdone. All the whining and complaining about Spring Ahead. It’s little consolation when you’ve lost an hour’s sleep that you will get it back come fall. You feel out of synch with nature because you sleep cycle has been interrupted and now you need to adjust your morning routine. We are creatures of habit and whenever something changes we don’t like it very much.

I recall my mother complaining about Daylight Savings Time when I was a kid. Despite the origin of the idea ages ago – I think Ben Franklin suggested it so the concept has been around for a while – for whatever reason when I was born there was no such thing as Eastern Daylight Savings Time in the State of Ohio. I guess the initiated that around the time I reached fourth or fifth grade. Anyway, Mom blamed businessmen and politicians for the whole thing, saying they’d conspired to create the thing int he interest of playing golf. As I stood outside in the dark waiting for the school bus to pick me up and whisk me off to school on the first Monday after the first time change it seemed odd to call to Daylight Savings Time. Obviously if it was being saving it wasn’t happening in the morning.

And that is exactly the case. It extends the daylight in the evening, for whatever purpose. Maybe it was originally intended to entice people to spend more of their evening free time outdoors, but in this day of service industry growth more and more of us work jobs that are anything but 9 to 5. So, in fact, it does benefit exactly those who have jobs that would allow them to play golf in the evening.

It was more of a hassle int he past before all the computerized devices we use all the time. Every clock in the housed and every wrist watch and pocket watch needed to be adjusted. Even after the advent of computers in our homes, there are persistent digital clock that aren’t smart enough to adjust themselves. You know, the one not he stove and the microwave. There used to be that one not he VCR, too, that eventually you just gave up on and left flashing 12:00 because it was hard to recall the instruction on how to change it twice a year – and the other times the power goes out during electrical storms and such.

I caught someone’s complaint in a post online, about why they change the time on a Sunday morning. Do they think no one will notice the loss of an hour then? Why not cut Friday afternoon an hour short instead? Too much disruption to the natural order of thing, you say? WTF? We are playing with this manmade thing called time, which does not actually exist until we start to measure it. We can say it is any time of the day we desire as long as we can get everyone else to agree with us, right?

Since I’m one of those service people in my side job I was outside last night when it was still light at a time which only the day before it had been dark. It was kind of nice to watch eh subset an hour later, I suppose. Still, this morning my body wanted it to be six AM so it could stay in bed when the clock claimed it was seven and time to get up and be about getting ready for the day. My son complained about it too, so it wasn’t just me. And out dog, Rocco, he is still on his own internal clock no matter how we try to tell him about Daylight Savings Time when the sun isn’t even up and we’re trying to convince him it is actually time for him to go outside and do his morning business.

As I don’t play golf I don’t understand, I guess. But how many holes can you get in with an extra hour of daylight? To me it seems like we’re into he summer before there is enough extra daylight time past five PM to matter much. There’s about a month or so around the summer solstice that it’s still light outside past 9PM. Imagine that! And the mornings are fairly light early on at that time of year as well. Do we suffer this Daylight Savings Time thing for a month or so of daylight hours extended into what, by all rights and tradition, should be night?

#DaylightSavingsTime #TimeChange #SpringAhead #FallBack