Lithograph from 1918 showing Uncle Sam turning a clock to Daylight Saving time. Image: Wikipedia.
Hello Daylight Saving Time:
It’s been months since I’ve seen you. Wait, how many? Six?? No way! Really! Six months. Hmph. Well, yeah, I guess that seems about right. You look good. You look older, but aren’t we all, Daylight Saving Time? Aren’t we all.
Daylight Saving Time — can I call you DST? Thanks. DST, I know tonight’s a big night for you; it’s one of the two biggest nights of your year and I appreciate that. You’ve got a lot going on. I mean, tonight, all the clocks displayed on the cell phones and televisions and the computers of the good people of America* will read “3:00 a.m.” at the very moment they ought to read “2 a.m.”, as though they have been meddled with by some insane supercomputer arch villain who has taken control of the world’s technology in order to make the people of Earth (or “the U.S.A.”) suffer by losing an hour of sleep.
Though you are not exactly an insane supercomputer arch villain, DST, you are close. We know this because I am a person of Earth/the U.S.A., and I will suffer as a result of your little time party. And I have decided you should know.
See, I am in St. Paul, Minnesota right now because I worked all day for the vivacious and intellectually buoyant quilters of Dakota County. Yes, after a long week of school and work, I spent my weekend doing more work. It was a great day — and it’s not your fault that I’m busier than a one-armed paper-hanger, DST — but I have just spent many hours doing homework and regular work at my Fairfield Inn & Suites and now I am tired but still have more reading to do and my flight leaves Minneapolis at 6 a.m., and that means that I have to get up at 3:45 a.m. and that is horrifying but it will be more horrifying because it will feel like 2:45 a.m. because of you.
And you also need to know that I have stared at that sentence for a long time and now I don’t even know if I’ve got this thing right, DST. All I know is that I have a wake-up call for 3:45 a.m. and I have set the alarm on my phone, as well, and that my flight leaves at 6 a.m. and because it’s Daylight Saving Time, I am going to be extra sad in a few hours.
You were a good idea, dear. World War I needed you. The farmers, they still appreciate you (at least that’s what people tend to say when they’re defending you.) But I do wonder, in this modern age, if you are doing what Congress wanted you to do, initially. If so, I can keep calm and carry on.
If not, if you’re just some outmoded law on the books that for no good reason hasn’t been nixed, yet — like some old law about not hitching your horse to your cousin’s barbershop pole — I shall exercise my right to be extremely grumpy about you for the next several days and grumpy afresh six months from now.
I am glad it’s not going to be dark by 4 p.m., now, though. But it’s barely enough!
Love,
Mary
*Except for the devices of the good people of Alaska and Hawaii, who do not observe you, Daylight Saving Time.