Goodbye daylight savings time. We were getting along so well, then you turned your back and walked away.
You do it every year. Why? Is it something we said? Do you have somewhere to go? Some other friends to go play with? We’re not bad people and we make good conversation.
Sit down, stay a while, stay the whole year. No one’s using the bed in the guestroom. We’ll make it up special for you.
I love daylight savings time, and hate losing it each year. I don’t like it getting dark early, especially when I’m out running. Strange as this may seem, I often worry not about getting hit by a car, but that I will be chased by a pack of territorial raccoon street thugs with rabies. It could happen.
And I don’t like changing all the clocks, which never goes very well.
I’ve got approximately 300 clocks, watches and assorted devices that need to be adjusted each year, and it takes me weeks to discover them all.
And even when I know where they are, I never change them all at once. Instead, I change just a couple, say the kitchen clock, a watch and my alarm clock. I go about my business, have breakfast and, just to make this a much more enjoyable experience, totally forget which clocks I changed.
Now, a wise man would think, “Oh, those are the ones running an hour later.” But I’m not a wise man. I’m a confused man with a bad sense of time, and I can’t remember which way I set them.
By the time I’m through, it’s clearly the middle of the day, yet my clocks are reading 6 a.m. I’m in the kitchen fixing eggs and grits, and people from work keep calling me. “How dare you call me this early in the morning,” I say.
The night of the change, I literally had to wake my wife up to ask her which way to set the clocks.
“Is it back or forward?” I asked her. “And if it’s back, which way is that? And what time is it now, anyway?”
I had already spent an hour with graph paper, a calculator and a book on algebra trying to figure it out. “So if you fall back, you take the square root of now, multiply it by the time it is in Kansas City and subtract the three-hour mistake I made last year and lived with for six months.”
Eventually I figure out what time it really is, but it doesn’t get any easier. Now I have to figure out how to change all those clocks that don’t have knobs and dials, but digital readouts and buttons. In my Jeep, the stereo has an 84-step process for adjusting the clock. And get one press of the buttons wrong and it drains the oil and activates the internal self-destruct mechanism.
Most digital clocks have buttons to change the time that don’t come marked. Why the mystery? Why can’t they be clearly marked? Why do you need a decoder ring and an Indian Jones-style adventure to figure it out?
“If I hold the staff of Ambeeza at a 45-degree angle, a ray of light from the sun will flash across the room illuminating the secret time-changing button … or activate the internal self-destruct mechanism.”
Beginning in 2007, there will be an extra couple weeks of daylight savings time. It’s all being done in the name of saving electricity. Saving electricity? That’s not why you do it! It’s so you can play later into the evening and run when the raccoons aren’t out.
And most of all, it’s to have a little extra time to not worry about how in the heck to change all those clocks, and which way to change them. Honey, which way was that again?