“Windows has updated your clock as a result of Daylight Savings. Please verify that your new clock settings are correct.”
Thank God for my computer, otherwise I’d have shown up an hour late to church. The last Daylight Saving change I set the clocks the night before – but only after Robin had also set the clocks, assuming I’d forget again (as is my custom). We ended up arriving to church disgustingly early and were stuck talking to the overnight janitor who feels emptying garbage every night is keeping him from his true calling of studying the cosmos to locate the reasoning behind bat corking, and has irrefutable proof in preserve jars at home that Julie Newmar is to blame.
Ah, so that’s why he’s an overnight janitor.
Long ago, Daylight Saving Time helped night-blind farmers and cranky cows. It’s the 21st century… why have milking machines if you can’t sleep in? Can cows tell time? So what difference does it make what time you milk them? Hook them up before dark, set the milking clock, go back inside and watch “Wheel of Fortune”. Of course, that would mean knowing how to set the timer, which likely rivals in difficulty getting the VCR to stop blinking twelve o’clock. Fortunately, on top of my VCR (yes, I still have one) I have a DVD player that always knows the correct time. Maybe I should find a way to run everything in the house through that DVD player.
I dread resetting the clocks. They’re everywhere: bedrooms, office, walls, car dashboards; I have a wristwatch with both analog and digital displays (for people that never understood “big hand, small hand”).
There’s a clock over the kitchen sink, always set seven minutes ahead to fool us into thinking we have less time to get to work. Of course, we know the clock is set ahead (we’re the ones that set the clock ahead after all), so we automatically do the math in our heads and realize we still have a few extra minutes, resulting in our being late to work anyway.
There’s the clock on our conventional oven (you have to say “conventional” otherwise instructions on frozen pizza boxes don’t make sense). Using the clock on the oven to start and stop cooking at specific times has proven just as impossible as programming our VCR to automatically record “Supernatural” each week, but I can’t have one clock an hour different than the others, so I change it.
The microwave clock. What’s the point of this clock? If your life is so busy that you have to keep constant watch over the time as your Lean Pockets cook for three and a half minutes, you have more problems in your life than time management.
It took me close to fifteen minutes to reset them all – and I’m positive I’ve missed a few. The forgotten ones will catch me off guard, throw off my equilibrium, and briefly thrust me into an alternate-time reality where everything happens exactly one hour behind schedule without the need of a flux capacitor and a DeLorean to do so.
Add up all the time it takes to reset clocks twice a year, multiply by the adult population of the U.S., and you have billions of hours wasted on clock-setting. Multiply by the minimum wage, and you likely have enough to pay off the national debt.
So my idea is simple: cancel Daylight Saving Time, pay off the deficit, and we all get a half hour of our lives back each year.
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