Monday, March 12, 2012

Daylight Savings Time Detailed





We turned our clocks ahead an hour this past Sunday morning, at 2 AM.

If you didn’t, then you’re late…or you’re early…one or the other.

Not sure which.

But you definitely are…one or the other.

It’s a little confusing…I know.

But that’s how life is.

I know that too.

What it means, basically, is that you pretty much lost that hour, plus whatever activity you would have normally been participating in at that time of the day…2 AM.

Poof…it’s just went away.

Gone, gone, gone.

Don’t ask where…just accept it. It’s better that way.


In the past, that would have meant “last call” was moved up and I lost an hour at the local tavern, not to mention the 3 or four beers I may or may not have consumed during that lost period.


Now, it just means I lose the hour I normally spend in bed, laying on my left side.  Now, at 2 AM, I just skip the left side and go immediately to my back from my stomach and hope the left side doesn’t notice.

If it notices, then…well, you don’t want to know.

So that’s how the time change affects me.

That, and I have trouble finding my socks at 7 AM again.

But overall, I enjoy the “spring forward”.

Suddenly the skies are bright again at 7:30 PM, which gives me so many more outside activities to put off, which makes me feel pretty good since I fancy myself a premier procrastinator.
In fact, I’ve been meaning to write a list of all the things I’ve been putting off, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Okay…that was pretty obvious.

But I was meaning to use that one for a while now and I never got around to it.


I did actually try to research this topic a little, but, Holy Clock Hands, Batman, there’s a lot of confusing history to all of this.

Apparently, back in the very long ago day, towns just judged the position of the sun and then set the time to whatever they thought it should be. 12:00 noon in one town might have been 12:28 in another. Naturally, this was problematic in that it made it impossible for anyone to ever be on time for a lunch date.

I guess, back then, without the immediacy of communication and travel that we have now, it really didn’t matter. It took such a long time to send a note to your cousin in Boston, from New York, to let him now you were coming to visit, let alone travel from New York to Boston, that by the time you got to where you were going, you’d forgotten why you wanted to go there in the first place, let alone what time it was.

I think Ben Franklin was one of the first folks to consider the idea of Daylight Savings Time.  I’m not sure if it was his observation, but someone noticed that even though the sun was up and at ‘em, by 4 or 5 AM, very few people were.  Mostly they were still huddled in their beds with the shades down doing whatever it was they did at that hour.

Don’t ask what…just accept it. It’s better that way.

Of course, the farmers were all up and about at that hour, but no one ever considers the farmers. I guess mostly because they spend so much time with cows and chickens.

So the progressive thinkers of that era decided why not take all that unused morning daylight and move it to the evening, where folks can enjoy it.

Except—again—the farmers, who go to bed early.

This idea was met with great enthusiasm, and while it was such an obvious improvement, it took several more decades before the idea was implemented, because no one could figure out how to actually move the daylight to the evening.

Hey, I said they were progressive thinkers, not exceptionally bright thinkers.


Then someone said, probably a woman who never got credit, “Hey, why don’t we just set the clocks ahead an hour?”



And someone responded, probably a man, who thought he deserved credit, at least more than he was getting, “That’s so stupid…who’s gonna run around changing all the clocks in town?”

To which the credit less woman responded, “Everyone can change their own.”

To which the townsfolk, including the women, scratched their beards, and said, ”Oh yeah…right….”

And that’s how it all began…at least according to me, which if you try to look it up, makes as much sense as any of the other stories.

Of course no one can ever leave a good idea alone…there’s always room for improvement. 

So it was fiddled with and moved around and even made permanent a few times, but changed back when people complained about having lunch before dawn.

When I was a kid we didn’t get the extra light until the 3rd Sunday in April so it was pretty much a 50/50 split with Standard time. Then that was moved up a few weeks, in the 80s, until now, where it’s been moved up again and we pretty much get a 2 to 1 split of extra daylight in the evening.

And everyone seems pretty happy with that, well, again … except for the farmers.

Okay…time for my nap. I’ve been nothing but tired since I lost that hour; I’m still trying to catch up.  







______________________________


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No....what's up with that???

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Just sayin....
 
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1 comment:

  1. What is its effect on "healthy, wealthy, and/or wise? As it relates to farmers?

    ReplyDelete

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