The body has to adjust to daylight saving time (04/03/06)

I hate daylight-saving time. Always have, always will. Dragging myself out of bed an hour earlier for half of the year has never made sense to me. I’d much rather sleep.

I know all the arguments about saving money and resources by not using so much energy and electricity at night. I understand the reasons for having more daylight in the evenings for recreational activities or whatever. It doesn’t matter. I don’t like getting up earlier than what I’m used to.

The fact that Indiana was one of a few states that didn’t reset their clocks was an unexpected benefit when we moved here. Now all that has changed. The whole state isn’t even on the same time. There are little pockets here and there that are in their own separate time zones. They go with one or the other of the neighboring states. I have been made to understand that this is not a new phenomenon. Apparently sometime in the past Indiana joined in the lunacy of daylight-saving time. I have no idea why they decided to opt with reason and revert back to not resetting their clocks. Now Indiana has changed its collective mind again. So in answer to the question, “Does anybody really know what time it is?” The answer is a resounding, “No!”

I fully realize that time is an artificial constraint. We have come to a consensus that the current time is three o’clock or whatever. We have a common agreement about what we are expected to be doing according to the numbers on the clock. That is what daylight-savin gtime is all about. It is an agreement for the first shift working world to begin and end their work days closer to sunrise than to sunset.

For the record, it was never about the farmers. Cows don’t wear watches. They just know that they prefer to be milked and fed at a specific time each day and if they aren’t then they get cranky. Cranky cows are no more pleasant than cranky people so we always milked and fed according to the cows’ schedules not some arbitrary clock. As far as crop farming goes, the crops really don’t care one way or the other what time it is.

We are not the only country that changes time. Many other countries observe what they refer to as “summer time” from March or April to sometime in the fall. Some places observe daylight savings time but they change the dates as to when it starts and stops to accommodate festivals or the whims of politics. The country of Jordan has “summer time” all year round. Countries near the equator have no need to mess with resetting their clocks as they have days and nights that are nearly equal all year long.

I grew up in Ohio and we always observed daylight-saving time. Invariably everybody was grumpy for most of the first week after the time change, with Monday being the worst. The human body doesn’t like having its internal clock adjusted. After about a week the grouchiness wore off for most people and things were back to normal. I expect it will be the same around here, although I have been told that not everyone gets grumpy.

As far as I’m concerned if you want to go to bed later and get up earlier in the summer then that’s your business. It would be just as easy for places to open an hour earlier in the summer as it is to reset the clocks. But in order to preserve the illusion that we are doing things at the same times as we are used to, we have agreed to find the manuals on our VCR’s and other electronic devices so we can all reset our clocks to the agreed upon time. We need instruction books because they have done away with the clock hands that one could rotate with the push of a finger.

Personally I think that if they are going to mess with the clocks then they should also mess with the calendar. How about if we turn the calendar ahead one day in the spring and back in the fall? Silly? Perhaps. But no more than this business of daylight-saving time. Nevertheless, I’ll turn my clocks ahead but don’t expect me to like it.[[In-content Ad]]