Saving Daylight

It happens every year.  Actually it happens twice a year.  I wake up on a Sunday morning, and since I usually doze off on the couch on Saturday night, the first clock I see is the one on the cable box beneath the TV.  If it's on a certain day in spring, I might think, "Wow, I slept for a long time."  If it's on a certain day in the fall, I might think, "Wow, I'm up early."  Usually somewhere along the line, when I'm stumbling around the kitchen for my second or third cup of coffee, it finally dawns on me that the clock in the kitchen shows a different time than the cable box.  Oh yeah, that's right, it's Daylight Savings Time again.

I complain about this ridiculous practice every time it comes around and to anyone that will listen, and I'm not alone.  A quick Google search of "Getting Rid of Daylight Savings Time", which I freely admit is a fairly biased collection of keywords, nevertheless returns several pages of outrage on the subject.  The complaints range from claims that it's bad for your health to claims that it's bad for the environment.  I think it's mostly just a nuisance; a small nuisance, sure, but a relatively pointless one too.  Is it really worth all this running around resetting clocks just to squeeze another hour out of those long summer evenings?  Does anyone really, truly care?  And yet we all go on doing it, slaves to our own collective routine.  Even though there is a significant and growing group of voices yelling, "Why do we keep doing this?", we keep doing it anyway.  Is it laziness?  Are we just too lethargic to get together on this and put it to rest?  It's like a man who puts a bucket under a leaking pipe that he has to dump every day instead of getting the pipe fixed.  Sure, he's doing more work in the long run, but he's being lazy just the same by continually putting off the simple solution to his problem.   Have we all, as a society, really fallen into such a slump?  We'd rather re-set fifteen different clocks twice a year until the end of time than take five minutes for some bureaucrat to stand up and say, "The Hell with this"?  Or is someone out there really crazy about Daylight Savings and they don't know how they'd live without it?

Well, I could certainly live without it.  On a personal level, I have my own specific reasons for being annoyed with this practice.  I work 3rd shift, from midnight to eight in the morning.  From mid-October to mid-March, I'm lucky if I see the sun at all.  But gradually, as the year goes on and rolls into spring, the sun comes up a little earlier each day, and I finally get a little bit of light to shine in on my last few hours of work.  But then we all crank forward the hands of time, and I'm thrown back into the darkness again.  Yeah...thanks.  You call it "Daylight Savings Time"; I call it "Daylight Stealing Time."  It's not enough for you people that you get to work and laugh and live in the sun all day, every day, you have to take that tiny little bit of sunlight that I get too?  Yes, I represent a small segment of the population, but shouldn't there at least be an even ratio when it comes to the distribution of something as universal as the sun?  Some people are so oblivious to my caste of society that they think the Daylight Savings system actually affords them an extra hour of daylight, as though this extra light just fell from the sky.  Well...it does, but you know what I mean.

I get the short end of the stick on the other side as well.  You know that precious, extra hour of the day, the one that's got us all running around changing our clocks?  You know what  I'm trying to do during that hour?  I'm TRYING TO SLEEP.  I'm just trying to get a couple of hours before I have to go to work, but there I am tossing and turning.  The heat is already unbearable enough, but then I have to deal with your extra hour of sunlight hitting me right square in the face.

So here I am, adding my voice to the general dissent on the subject, for all the good it'll do.  I'm sure, long after all our cites have crumbled and our civilization has fallen, we'll probably still be ritualistically re-setting the few rusty time pieces that remain.  Knowing my luck, this pointless practice will probably be the one thing to endure, long after we've forgotten why we even keep doing it.  We don't even seem too clear about it now.  We claim it's for the farmers, but then the farmer perks up at the mention of his name and says, "What?  Don't look at me.  This was your idea."  But what are you gonna do?  Anyway, I gotta go.  I have a bucket to dump.