Last night the local news was doing a story on Daylight Savings Time (heretofore known as DST) and how some people were opposed to it. They interviewed this one lady who was against DST. She had big, big red hair and looked like a cat person (if you know what I mean). She showed off her watch and clock collections and said that she refused to turn her clocks back. Well, that’s just great, Honey, but no one cares. You’re not making some grand social statement by not setting your clocks back, you’re just being childish.
Cat Lady then went on to say that DST causes stress to people and that by eliminating it, we could relieve a bit of stress in this stressful, stressful world. How tightly wound (no pun intended…) are you that setting your clocks back one hour (or ahead one hour) is stressful? Most people love the Fall Back because it means a free hour of sleep. To be fair, it’s possible the Cat Lady has a super-stressful job, like deactivating nuclear weapons in airtight rooms full of nerve gas with holes in her biosuit. In that case, I can empathize.
There was also an interview with a Clock Shop owner who had to reset all the clocks in his store. Poor baby! It’s not as if he wasn’t aware of this when he started his business. He wasn’t like:
Daylight savings time? What’s that?"
[someone explains it. This takes awhile: there are
puppets and a flow-chart involved]
"You’re not fucking serious! Oh, man! This is too
stressful! I knew I should have joined the bomb squad."
Clock Boy said he’d be getting lots of calls over the next couple of days from people who didn’t know how to set adjust their clocks. Yeah. Two things with that: 1) It’s your job! Suck it up, Clock Boy! 2) Who doesn’t know how to change their clocks? (And as I write that I realize the answer is, sadly, lots of people. For example, I bet you $20 that when I go home at Christmas neither of the clocks in my parents' vehicles will have been changed. Really, people, read the manual already!)
Now, I understand it can be time consuming setting your clocks back, especially if you have a digital clock that only counts forward. For example, last time I reset my clock at 12am, so I had to push the “hour” button 23 (!) times to make it say “11pm.” It took almost a minute out of my life! Whose time is that precious (I’m talking to you, Cat Lady) that you can’t spare one minute (or less: analog watches take mere seconds!) to set back a clock? What do you do after a power failure when you have to reset the hour and the minutes? Do you just curl into a corner and die? What about traveling in different time zones? (Don’t tell me you’re anti-time zones too). Do you have to book time off work at the Bomb Lab to de-stress? Do you check yourself into a hospital suffering from exhaustion? GROW UP.
Of all the things in this vast, screwed-up world that you can be against, DST shouldn’t even be an option. Entire species are vanishing everyday, we are literally killing the planet with our very existence, everything we eat causes cancer, there are children in 3rd world countries dying of diseases that are treatable and/or curable, children in our own country can’t read, our military couldn’t defend a hockey net, and you pick Daylight Savings Time as your personal crusade? Are you completely lacking a moral and social conscience? Are you so devoid of awareness that this strikes you as a grand injustice? Read a newspaper, watch the news, look outside and then tell me that DST is what’s causing people stress in this world.
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