Tag: time change

Daylight saving time is dumb but it won’t kill you

Daylight Saving Time begins Sunday.

I don’t really care. I’m the least busy person I know.

Everybody still says we’ll all lose an hour’s sleep Saturday night. Not me. I go to bed when I’m tired on Saturday and wake up Sunday morning when I’m finished sleeping. The clock says whatever it says, I don’t care.

The only time changing the clock became a personal issue is when I was working on the air at radio stations on the Fall Back all night shift. I would slog through the 1-2 a.m. hour and then, presto time change-o! – it was 1 a.m. again! That kinda sucked.

If you do have to awaken at a particular time on Sunday and you’re afraid losing an hour’s sleep will kick your butt I have two suggestions: go to bed earlier or change your plans.

Seriously, why is this a big deal?

It’s exactly the same as when you fly into a different time zone that’s one hour ahead. Does that wreak havoc in your life for as much as five days as they keep telling us in the news? I don’t think so.

Lately we’ve been treated to sensationalized news stories telling us how changing the clocks one hour leads to more highway deaths for sleepy drivers and more heart attacks and strokes for people who have trouble adjusting their bodies to the arbitrary numbers we call time.

Oh, puh-leeze!

I don’t mean to be a jerk but if you have a heart attack because of Daylight Saving Time I’m guessing that your heart was in critical distress before you changed the clock.

Farmers: “Make hay while the sun shines.”

We’ve all been taught that the goal of Daylight Saving Time was to give farmers an extra hour of daylight. Farmers, being much smarter than the rest of us, call that a big pile of horse hockey. The sun rises and sets on its own schedule all year ’round. Farmers adjust their work to the actual hours of daylight, not clocks.

And, by the way, there really are more hours of daylight in the summer. We don’t need to extend them artificially by changing our clocks.

10:30 P.M. – Oh, Canada!

One summer Carolann and I drove to the Canadian Rockies. It didn’t get dark until 10:30 P.M.! The Canadians seem to be just fine with it.

The only thing I find remotely interesting in all of this is the history of keeping time in the United States.

Until 1883 clocks were set at noon when the sun was straight overhead no matter where you happened to be. This made sense except that a town fifty miles east or west would set their clocks to noon when the sun was straight overhead a few minutes earlier or later.

That was no big deal until the railroads came along and started moving people great distances faster than the speed of the overhead sun. The availability of pocket watches made the problem suddenly obvious: your watch said 2:30 but the clock at the railroad station where you just arrived might say it was 3:15.

Imagine flying into an airport today and needing to change planes. Say it only takes you five minutes to walk from one terminal to another but when you get there you’ve mysteriously lost half an hour and missed your connecting flight.

That’s how railroads worked until 1883. There were literally hundreds of time zones in the U.S.

But then the government got involved and, as usual, made everything work smoothly.

But here’s the good news: if we insist on maintaining this silly tradition at least we’re darned close to living in a world where all clocks change themselves. Your watches, computers, tablets and phones already do this.  Clocks on stoves and in cars can’t be far behind.

And you know what that means?  Blessedly, nothing.

We’ll never notice anything except that it suddenly stays light an hour longer.

“Hmm. I guess the time changed last night.”

That’s all we’ll say.

If newspapers, TV and radio stop beating us over the head with stuff to worry about we’ll all be fine.

Grandma Standard Time

This weekend is the end of Daylight Saving Time. 

In case you didn’t get the message it’s “saving,” not “savings” with an “s” at the end. You can’t put daylight or time in a bank to be withdrawn and spent in the future. That would be very cool but it doesn’t work that way. Time doesn’t care who you are, what you think, or how you use the finite number of breaths and heartbeats given to you on this earth. When you’re finished, that’s it. Doesn’t matter what the clock says, your time is up.

Time just marches on, as we say.

Or flies if you’re having fun.

Still, it’s amazing how many intelligent and otherwise reasonable people seem to think that when we turn the clocks back one hour late Saturday night or early Sunday morning they will actually, magically GAIN an honest-to-God hour in their lives. “Yay!” they say, “I get to sleep an extra hour!”

Patiently, I try to explain, “Only if you have to go to church or an appointment. Otherwise, you’ll sleep the same number of hours but the time on the clock will be different, that’s all.”

They don’t want to hear this. For some reason, the fact that they turned the clock back one hour when they went to bed has totally slipped or befuddled their minds.

“No, when I wake up at ten tomorrow morning it will really be eleven!”

And that’s where logic has somehow jumped the rails and turned over in a ditch.

Then there’s ridiculous business about how the time change is hazardous to our health. More car accidents, they claim. For some reason, we’re more likely to have a heart attack. Because of a one-hour clock change? Puh-leeze! It’s no different than if I fly from Dallas to Denver. My phone will adjust the time and I’ll never notice.

My late, beloved Grandma Webster used to put us through our paces on this when we were kids. For days after a time change, she would say, “It’s really nine o’clock. Time for you kids to get in bed.”

“No, Grandma, it really is EIGHT o’clock!” we’d explain. “Look, it says so right on the clock!”

She was undaunted because we were just dumb kids and she was in charge. And, so, we’d have to go to bed an hour early because the world had recently switched to Standard Time. Nevertheless, six months later we’d go through the same routine with her in the opposite direction.

“Why are you kids up so early? It’s really only six in the morning.”

“Grandma, no. It’s SEVEN! See? The clock says so!”

After a while, she’d get her circadian clock in tune with the one on the stove. But it was a struggle to get her there.

And six months later, we’d do it all over again.

But one year my uncles (3 and 4 years older than me) got her back. Grandma fell asleep in front of the TV around 7:00 p.m. The boys changed the clock to read 1:00 a.m. We all got our pajamas on and climbed into bed while one of the brothers changed the TV to a non-working channel full of static and woke her up. She thought it was six hours later than it was, got up out of her chair, turned off the lights and the TV, and went to bed.

If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’.