What time is it? Time for confusion

This is one of two weekends every year that confuse me.

The first is the second weekend in March when we set our clocks for daylight saving time. The second is this weekend when daylight saving time ends, specifically at 2 a.m. Sunday morning. Except, we don’t physically change most of our timepieces anymore ‘cause most clocks reset themselves one way or the other and even if they didn’t, I don’t know anyone who sets their alarm for 2 a.m. on Sunday just to wake up, change a clock and then go back to sleep.

I’ve never really gotten the whole “spring forward, fall back” expression that’s supposed to help us remember which way we turn our clocks for the start and end of daylight saving time. It has always befuddled me.

Never in my life have I “sprung forward” or “fallen back.” Maybe it’s just me but my experience has always been that I “spring back,” usually in surprise, and “fall forward,” usually from sheer clumsiness tripping over my own feet. Therefore this mnemonic is about as helpful to me as a rock.

Back in the day, before cell phones and computers and watches were all linked up to the great invisible computer in the stratosphere, when you actually had to manually reset timekeepers, my beloved husband used to get his thrills by only resetting some of the clocks in the house. This inevitably led to me walking around the house looking at various clocks and asking, “Is this the new time or the old time?” To which, if was the end of daylight saving, he’d reply, “It’s the new beginning of the old time.” Again, about as helpful as a rock, leaving me wasting at least an hour trying to figure out if I’d gained or lost an hour and did or didn’t have enough time to go back to bed and catch a few extra z’s.

DST was first implemented in the U.S. with the Standard Time Act of 1918, a wartime measure passed in the interest of adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources during WWI. But the guy who is widely credited with coming up with the concept was an entomologist named George Hudson from New Zealand who, in 1895, proposed a two-hour time shift so he’d have more hours of sunlight after work to go bug hunting. But before ol’ George decided it would be a good idea to screw around with time, Benjamin Franklin proposed a version of DST in a 1784 essay titled “An Economic Project.”

Then in 1907, William Willett, a Londoner, began seriously advocating for DST. He wrote a pamphlet titled “Waste of Daylight,” in which he lobbied for advancing clocks 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April, and retarding them by the same amount on the four Sundays in September. I’m seriously glad this idea didn’t gain any traction because then there’d be eight weekends a year during which I’d be running late or early and completely disoriented walking around asking, “What time is it, really?”

Personally I prefer DST to “standard time.” I mean it’s nice to have it light later in the evening and even though you lose an hour of sleep which makes the first Monday after the change loooong first workweek day at least with

DST, happy hour is 60 minutes earlier and it’s 5 o’clock somewhere an hour earlier so, it’s got that goin’ for it.

But this is the “fall back” weekend where while you sleep you gain an hour of time which, I guess in the scheme of things, is better than gaining a pound of fat while you sleep. Thing is though for at least the first week of standard time you don’t really get that extra hour to snooze because, your pets can’t tell time so instead of waking up at the “new” 6 a.m., Fluffy, Fido and Spot get you up at the old 50 a.m., or something like that.

Also turning the clock back one hour doesn’t do me any good. Not really. What would really do me some good would be turning the clock back 15-20 years. Now that would be something to get excited about.