Clocking In

I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m beginning to think our twice-a-year time shifting in and out of Daylight Saving Time is useless. This year, it fell on Halloween weekend, so I joked that vampires get an extra nighttime hour to suck blood, but in practice, they don’t: the number of hours of darkness and daylight before we set our clocks behind remains the same afterward. We “give up” an hour in the spring and we “get it back” in the fall, and when we “get it back,” it seems like a gift of some sort. Sorry, but this sounds an awful lot like taxes.

Animals, of course, do not recognize our artificial time shifts. Our pets tend to show up in the morning at their food dishes according to when daylight happens, expecting us to perform for them. It may be harder for human beings, as our fixed schedules don’t adjust for daylight: you either get up in darkness to go to work or drive home in darkness. Which is better? In the modern world, most people do both.

The winter months don’t help much with this process, simply because there are fewer hours of daylight on both ends. I have long loved DST because it says “spring,” and because those long summer evenings are delightful. But because there are so many hours of daylight in temperate latitudes, aren’t those summer evenings long anyway?

We can get into fistfights about how much energy DST actually saves, the necessity for children to wait for school buses in the dark, or the number of traffic accidents that occur because of the abrupt change in light conditions caused by the one-hour shift. But there are so many differences in workstyles and lifestyles that these time shifts will cause pain for some people and pleasure for others. So it all comes out in the wash, which is an argument for just leaving the clocks alone.

The other problem is, the whole DST thing is all subject to the whims of legislators. Arizona might secede from the Union if it were told it had to make the time shifts (and don’t ask, “Would we miss it?”). Plus, when Congress changed the dates of DST some years ago, many of my older electronic devices, which had DST built into them, didn’t get the memo, and choosing “automatic” for the time-set feature on these things is unreliable. So I have to reset them four times a year instead of twice.

We actually do have control over the amount of daylight we enjoy, but it’s expensive. We have to change latitudes. You can have the Endless Summer promised by the movie title just by having homes in two different hemispheres. Or, if you prefer, endless winter. Which means if you’re vampire, you’d better like it cold.

I’ll be back in about an hour, I have to run around the house and reset about 27 things. See ya.