I wanted to kvetch about daylight saving time, but I was too sleep-deprived to do it until today.
Ben Franklin didn’t invent daylight saving time, even though he is often credited with it. He wrote a satirical letter in a French newspaper urging Parisians to get up earlier to enjoy the sunshine in the morning and suggesting that officials ring church bells and set off cannons to make them get up earlier. I’d be more against cannons and church bells than I am against daylight saving time: slightly more.
Daylight saving time came into wide use in the USA and Europe around World War I. In case you’re wondering, they didn’t call World War I when it was going on, but the name of World War II is disturbing because it implies that the people who named it expected at least one more. But I digress, as usual.
I don’t like daylight saving time because I don’t like getting up early, or earlier. I do want to get up to demonstrate that I’m not dead, but I don’t want to demonstrate early. And I say this as someone who had at least one job that required me to get up way earlier than average. How does 2:30 AM grab you?
The two worst things about that job were getting up and the strange schedule it put me on. When that alarm clock went off at 2:30 AM, I was startled awake and often grabbed the bed to keep from falling up, because that’s how disoriented I was. My wife, by the way, was a saint to put up with it because she didn’t have to wake up then, ever.
Having a tuna fish sandwich for lunch at 8:30 AM wasn’t too cool either.
Has anyone ever kept you up past your bedtime, even as a child? Did you like it? Once, when I was on that schedule, my father-in-law took my wife and me to a party and kept us out not past my bedtime, but past the time I usually woke up! After that, you tell me where it is, and I’ll drive, even though I don’t get up that early anymore.
Switching back to standard time is fine. It happens during the busiest period of my year, so I don’t adjust to the time and I go to work an hour earlier without any trauma. I ease into that time change around Christmas.
I like summer and I like extra hours of daylight. I hate the pain and suffering that comes with switching to daylight saving time. Did you know there’s no conclusive evidence that it saves energy or reduces the cost of anything?
In Ancient Rome, there were 12 hours of daylight every day of the year. The way they accomplished that was to have longer and shorter hours depending on the time of year. That doesn’t work for me either.
I don’t have a solution. I just felt like ranting about it. Mission accomplished.
