Last night the local news was doing a story on Daylight Savings Time (heretofore known as DST) and how some people were against 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 was showing off her watch and clock collections (my watch collection is way better) and saying 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 (don’t even get me started on stress) and that by eliminating it, we could relieve a bit of stress from people in this stressful, stressful world. How tightly wound (no pun intended…) are you that setting your clocks back 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 a hole in her biosuit. Then, maybe, I could 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 a while, 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 don’t know how to set back their clocks. Yeah. Two things with that 1) it’s your job! Suck it up, Clock Boy! 2) Who doesn’t know how to set their clocks back? (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 set back. 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 night 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?
[Then this whole thing dissolved into a really cynical anti-everything rant that was typical of me in my early 20s]
No comments:
Post a Comment