Oh yippee skippy, it’s Daylight Savings Time “spring forward” day again. Time to reset the clocks on the thermostat, the stove, the coffee maker, the microwave, the car stereo, the cats ….
Well, maybe not the cats. I do wish they had an “off” switch though.
Still, I wonder why we bother with it anymore. Daylight Savings Time is a relic of World War I and has been gradually extended ever since. Today it’s more standard than “Standard” time, in effect for nearly eight months out of the year. Yup, we won’t be “falling back” until 3 November. Personally I’d be in favor of making DST our year-round “standard” time and dispensing with the old Standard Time entirely. Apparently exactly that was tried in the mid 70s. I was too young to remember it, of course.
Which is a shame. I understand there was quite a party in the 2T back in ’74.
Image credit: Docob5
Anyway, year-round DST was scrapped because people were concerned about kids leaving for school in the dark. This makes about as much sense as extending DST to accommodate Halloween trick-or-treaters (which, sadly, was also done). Besides, if you grew up in a far western section of any given time zone, you went to school in the dark for part of the year anyway. You know, places like … southern Idaho.
And I turned out just fine. *twitch*
So America, don’t forget to set your clocks today. But if you live in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Arizona outside the Navajo Nation, parts of western Indiana (where no one seems to know what the hell time it is in the first place), or Pocatello, Idaho (where it’s still 1968), you don’t need to worry about it. Simple, right?
Superfluous Bloviations 