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Cats without clocks
Daylight Saving Time is officially over. The problem is that my cat forgot to reset her internal clock. So she’s waking me at 4:30 a.m. every morning, which is actually 5:30 in Mean Mother Nature Time. To make matters worse, my spouse works for a global organization that insists on holding international conference calls. And many of the employees participating in those communications live either in countries that don’t observe DST or that reset their clocks on a different schedule from the U.S. Thus, on a recent morning, I awoke at 6:00 a.m. (for the second time) to the sounds of voices rising and falling through our home speakerphone. Perhaps even more discouraging, I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. Along with these irritations, time changes force me to reset electronic devices that have sophisticated parts, like buttons and keys, which require the aid of a child to change. I ask you, who needs this kind of humiliation? Even my husband’s “atomic” watch failed to automatically adjust itself for Standard Time. So he attempted to manually reset the gadget, and now the device is accurate—provided you subtract five hours. Wouldn’t life be much simpler if we just stopped tampering with time? The whole idea of Daylight Saving Time (or Daylight Savings Time for everyone except editors) is outdated. Good grief, Benjamin Franklin is credited with conceiving this concept. And we know what else he’s responsible for. He was the father of electricity. This whole “spring forward/fall back” idea could be one colossal energy conspiracy. Ok, sure you received extra daylight hours during your summer evenings. But what happened to your electric bills? If you have air conditioning, you probably had to crank down the thermostat for longer to cool your house before bedtime. And if you don’t possess A/C, then the sun likely couldn’t have set soon enough to suit you, anyway. What did anyone really save, other than some shareholder profits, by spinning daylight forward an hour? Thanks to Congress, DST was extended through a later date in 2007 than in previous years. George W. Bush signed into effect The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which increased the span of DST by several weeks beginning in 2007. And that action insured that, for the first time in a decade, the U.S. observance of DST would no longer coincide with that of the European Union. Though this might seem a fitting retaliation for the metric system, it’s a bit harsh on global corporations and travelers. Of course, we all know that the real reason for DST being extended into the month of November was to permit more daylight hours for an important American custom: trick-or-treating. And maybe to preserve other sweet donations too. Seriously. I read that for years candy lobbyists had been pushing for that change. This leads me to an important related question: Where can I apply to become a truffle lobbyist? Proponents of DST insist that observance of this time change saves energy, reduces crime, and lessens the number of automobile accidents each year. But DST also occurs during the summer months, when fewer people are commuting, more folks are away from home on vacation and gasoline prices are at their seasonal peak. I suspect that fuel costs might even influence criminal mobility. The government has promised to study the impact of DST and its recently expanded schedule. That important (and no doubt, expensive) task has been assigned to none other than the Department of Energy. Depending on the findings from this research study, in the future we may or may not continue to observe the same schedule for Daylight Stupid Time. But from now until whenever DST next begins, I’m simply going to work at getting in sync with my cat. (Previously published in The Dallas Morning News, November 8, 2007.) ### |
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Copyright © 2005 Diana M. Estill - All Rights ReservedLast Updated: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 09:01 PM
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