Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

 In my sixty years on the planet, I like to imagine that I have had sixty extra hours to sleep, due to all that silliness surrounding setting clocks back in the fall. This illusion disappears abruptly as soon as I remember that I have sprung forward just as many times. This sum zero equation began long before I was born, 1916 to be precise. It moved from Europe to the United States in 1918, and we have never looked back. Or forward. You understand the problem here. 

The initial thoughts surrounding the artificial movement of clocks in a coordinated effort to allow humans to walk around more in the light of day. Saving daylight, get it? Its origins can be traced back to one Benjamin Franklin, who suggested this practice to help save candles. That was before 1918, so Ben's notions fell by the wayside. Even though a number of countries hopped on the Daylight Savings Time bandwagon after successful implementation in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. Generations of otherwise clever people have bought into the notion that they are "saving time" by pushing the hands of their clocks backward, then a few months later shoving them forward again. It's supposed to be good for us, like LIFE cereal. 

Mostly, it has created its own swirling eddy of confusion, not the least of which is how to make the most of the experience. I have very deeply embedded circadian rhythms, and the suggestion that one day I will magically awake an hour earlier because of the manipulation of all the clocks in my house is ludicrous to me. The chore of tracking down all the chronometers in and around me is enough to keep me fretting late into the night, and up early the next morning to check my work. 

The stupid clock in the car is always the last one to be reconfigured. That usually gets done within a week or so of the magical hour when the time pixies alter our existence as only they can. 

Then there's this: When I worked late night at Arby's, we were open until two in the morning, since nothing feeds hungry drunk boys more than thinly sliced "roast beef" and potato cakes. Inevitably, it was that one Saturday in late October when two o'clock suddenly marched back to one. The powers that be at the franchise office issued an edict that told us all to treat this as a "value added" hour. It was a chance to ring up an extra hour of sales, so why not keep those doors open? 

Because the only people out in search of the menu offerings at Arby's during that hour were not specifically equipped to manage their digestive systems any better than they were able to hold their alcohol. Looking back on those years, it was those few extra hours that I had tacked onto my life in brown polyester that I regret the most. 

Will I miss Daylight Savings Time? About as much as I miss a Beef 'n' Cheddar.