Roll back the clock on this crazy idea?
It’s back: Our semiannual ritual of national institutional jet lag. Some of us will complain that they did it way back when for farmers or railroads, and since the country only has about four farmers left, and nobody rides the rails, why are we still bothering?
Others will complain about the people complaining about it. It’s just a hour, and who cares if that’s the hour you would’ve used to boil 20 threeminute eggs?
And there are always those grammar Nazis yelling at you that there’s no “S” at the end of “saving” in daylightsaving time. I’m sure there’s some other kind of nitpicker out there saying I shouldn’t have used “grammar Nazi” for a spelling error. Maybe you’re right. Let me sleep on it.
The real problem is — no one is serious about fixing the real problem: Twice a year, most of the nation compliantly submits to institutionalized sleep deprivation.
I know what you’re thinking: You love it when we move the clock back an hour. You get to sleep in. Yeah, well that’s what they want you to think! They’re just buttering you up before election day.
And now it sometimes happens after election day. Sounds like a rigged election plot to me!
Years ago as a morning radio host, we called some guy in Indiana who lived on one side of the time line and worked on the other.
“I’m never late for work,” he joked. “Sometimes I’m late for dinner, though.”
Sleep researchers say it can take a week to acclimate. In the United States, you’ve just come off eight months of daylightsaving time, or you were just getting used to daylightsaving time and then they take it away from you. The thing about daylightsaving time: You’re probably gonna get up the same time your body clock usually gets you up, except then you’ll have to stay awake longer. And if you lost an hour of sleep, you’re hating life but you end up falling asleep earlier in the evening.
Which is it, springing back or falling forward? Someone always asks. It’s too confusing. An alternative: Winter coats on the rack, turn the clock back. Bikini thong on the bed, turn the clock ahead.
And for what? Any safety benefits of having more daylight in the afternoon are negated by having 220 million sleepdeprived drivers forgetting which one is the brake pedal.
As for the safety of schoolchildren, give me a break. Any child who walks to school anymore is wearing a neon jacket with enough flashing LEDs to make a fire truck pull over.
Fear not, dear citizen! Help is on the way. Congressional legislation has been introduced to make daylightsaving time permanent: The Sunshine Protection Act. Yeah, like the sun needs protecting. Oh, brother! But don’t laugh. It just might be the only truly bipartisan legislation to pass in the next two years. And they’ll boast about unity in doing so.
Tell you what, here’s a compromise. The time change used to run from October to April, or April to October depending on whether you like the designated hitter rule or not. Now it’s November to March. Maybe, if they really wanna keep it, just do it from Jan. 1 to Jan. 30. Everyone is hung over from New Year’s so they can use the extra hour of sleep, and then they’re hibernating through the rest of the month so they won’t miss losing that extra hour of sleep come February first. Besides, who’s gonna miss another “white sale”? (Besides, there’s always that Presidents Day mattress sale. Yowzah!)
Don’t you think it’s strange that we Americans, who are always seething over something government just made us do, still let the government tell us when to wake up? Telling us when to wake up isn’t the government’s job; it’s your bladder’s job.
I say, next time we get an extra hour of sleep, we keep it.