Daylight-Saving Time begins Sunday at 2 a.m., for which I am glad, because that means I get an extra hour of daylight in the evenings, which in turn makes it seem more like spring (even if the weather isn’t there yet) and less like this interminable winter that I’ve had to endure. (Yes, I said “I” and not “we” because, on IDWID, it’s all about me. Maybe IDWID actually stands for “I Do What I Do.”)
Daylight-Saving Time is a reason to rejoice, not complain, and yet half the people who talk about DST or in the news stories I read, there’s this underlying tone of, or even the direct quote, “Oh, we’re losing an hour of sleep this weekend.” To which I say, “Bah.” Quityerwhining.
Unless you work overnight Saturday, or early Sunday morning, who cares? So you “lose an hour.” It doesn’t even have to be “an hour of sleep.” You have all weekend to make it up. If you don’t have to be anywhere Sunday morning, which I don’t, then you can make up this hour by simply sleeping until 11:00 rather than 10:00. Going to church? Skip it. You’re an adult. Or go to church; I don’t care. Just don’t whine about it.
Or, better yet, just call it a loss of a day and sleep until 2:00.
Or, you know, go to bed an hour earlier. It’s a freaking hour, for crying out loud. It’s not like eight-hour jet lag.
I’m allowed to complain about winter sucking the life out of me. You’re not allowed to complain about an hour time-shift destroying your precious sleep cycle. Because I make the rules.
You wussies.
Agreed,
I love this time of year. So what if we lose an hour. I’d gladly take the extra daylight we are going to get over a loss of one hour of sleep or something. Every year it’s the same thing about DST and I really have to wonder why people get so uptight about it. Personally, I wish we would be in Daylight Time year round, but I know we can’t so I’m used to it. I just love the fact that for more than half the year, we have more daylight in the evenings. It’s a beautiful thing.
If we had DST all year, in December it’d be dark in the morning until, like 8 a.m. That would be weird. And it’d still be dark again by 5:30 or 6 p.m.
There are a couple of minor annoyances to changing the clocks that haven’t been mentioned.
One is that I happen to have two atomic clocks that keep time great except for twice a year. They have a chip inside that changes the time based on the “old” daylight and standard time change dates. I guess no one figured on the government stepping in to change these.
I’ve found a “workaround” to this problem, though: tonight I’ll change the time zones on these clocks to Eastern, which is an hour ahead of us. That way the time will be correct tomorrow, since it won’t change automatically at 2 a.m. On the first Saturday night of April, I’ll change the time zones back to Central. At 2 a.m., my clocks will automatically set ahead an hour.
It’s annoying, but it works; and I don’t want to buy new clocks because the government decided we needed to change these dates to “save” money. Of course, we save a ton of money; that’s why the U.S. economy is in such great shape!
The other minor problem is that it’s not as light in the monning now. Of course, if you get up after 7 a.m., it doesn’t really matter. I happen to leave for work at 6:30, so the lighter mornings have been nice. Oh well, the days are getting longer anyway, so this won’t really affect anyone for very long.
I like the lighter evenings, too!
I have to admit, it used to be a problem in my student days working part-time.
We’d be clubbing on saturday until 3 or 4am, get home for 5 or 6, then have to be at work on sunday morning for 9:30.
Ah happy days. How the hell did we used to do that?
Well, as a Hoosier living in the State of Indiana, I only began using DST about a year and a half ago. Before then we were but one island in an archipelago of chronological rebellion; one ship in a fleet of far-flung fellow travelers along the ‘Great Chroniton River’, (along with Arizona, Hawaii, and the US island Territories), refusing to set our clocks by the standards of the rest of the Union.
…But that’s the overelaborate way of saying we were just too lazy to reset our clocks, and we were oblivious to the fact that our neighboring States couldn’t figure out what time it was supposed to be here.
Now that we finally settled on joining the Eastern time-zone (well, most counties) and we do observe DST, I rather like the extra evening daylight, especially with it lasting to 9:30pm or more in Summer. And as for the “lost hour” in March?
Well, no sleep lost here. As a fella that works an overnight shift Saturday night to Sunday morning, I got to work one hour less. I celebrated vigorously as my 10-hour shift transformed into a 9-hour shift. (But should I have been so happy? Instead of 10 hours in front of my work computer reading Jammer’s Reviews, I only had 9 hours for it.) Indeed, perhaps I can be accused of basking in the joy of the hour-less-of-work with too much vigor; as people who lose the vast 60 minutes of sleep might be, just perhaps, complaining just slightly too much.
For example how many minutes overall- 30, 60, 90?- do some people expend in complaining about the 60 minutes of lost sleep…? Hmmm.
All in all- it does even out, in the end. The hour’s in the bank. We’ll all get it back later in the year. And I’ll get a nice long 11-hour night, hopefully with reviews of BSG season 4 to read (if, aside from ‘Razor’, season 4 ever gets on the air!)
I’m a resident of Arizona, which seems to be the one remaining state in the union that’s a hold-out against Daylight Saving Time. I’ve developed a deep hatred for DST. Or, rather, switching back and forth Arizona’s odd system forces because of it.
AZ is synced up with the Pacific time zone for half the year (now, that we’ve switched) and Mountain time for the other half. I loathe PST. Suddenly, everything is irritatingly early. Friends on the east coast I could talk with easily enough half the year are now heading out (or asleep) by the time I get off work. Calling the east coast for work (I work at a newspaper) is a nightmare, as I don’t get into the office until their noon and have to scramble to get call-backs from DC or New York before it’s 2 p.m. here. It’s astounding what a cushion an hour gives you. Plus, no one outside AZ ever knows what time it is here. Quite annoying.
I certainly understand why Arizona doesn’t observe DST. No one here wants an extra hour of daylight when July hits and its 120 degrees. But if the government is going to be jiggering with DST in a (misguided, it costs more!) effort to save energy or money, I hope the AZ tradition of non-observance is subject to change.
Well, our clocks changed last night here in the UK (29th March 2008) so sunday morning we lost the hour. Not that the cat cared, the evil beast woke me up at 5:30 as the sun was bright so I was up anyway. Knock on affect was I wasn’t hungry by lunchtime so we waited any hour.
With hardships like that, I feel it is my duty to whine
Well, it is no fun when you have a toddler and the time changes. It’s been several weeks and we have just now got our daughter back on a regular sleeping schedule.
I don’t really care if we have daylight savings time or standard time-it would be nice just to pick one and stick with it.
Sarah, don’t expect Arizona to change. The people here seem to like being different from the rest of the country. I just moved from Ohio and I also hate that the state doesn’t observe DST. As you say, it’s to spare us more time in the sun, but here’s a thought for construction workers and people who work outside: GET UP AN HOUR EARLIER and stay indoors when the sun is highest in the sky. Besides, a lot of construction seems to be done during the night anyway. What I dislike about AZ is how early it gets dark. In Aug/Sep, it’s still warm enough to eat dinner outside but you can’t (well, you *could*) because it’s pitch black at 6pm. This is good for vampires but crummy for the rest of us. You’re also correct that people outside AZ don’t realize we don’t change our clocks. Websites and message boards ask me what time zone I’m in and I don’t know what to put because I’m not Pacific or Mountain. Or, I’m both.
Why don’t they just switch the clocks for half an hour ONCE and then never bother again. It saves us the trouble of changing time twice a year (which apparently is a lot more expensive than it seems) and we still get more daylight.
my 2 cents
I agree about the atomic clocks being a pain the butt with regards to Daily Savings Time. The alarm clock in my bedroom automatically sets itself according to the old DST dates. I have to remember when it’s going to happen and reset it the next morning and then manually add or subtract the hour on the correct day. Fortunately, it happens on a weekend, so you have a day to figure it out before worrying about your schedule (unless you make plans on Sunday).