When I woke up on Sunday morning at 7:30, my alarm clock confirmed the time.
“7:30”.
But when I looked at my phone, somebody expected me to believe that it was actually 8:30. Someone, or something, had changed the ‘time’ on my phone to be one hour later than it really was.
Then I turned on my computer, and lo and behold, the same person — or maybe, an evil Artificial Intelligence — had somehow accessed my computer during the night and changed the ‘time’ to 8:30.
I am not a person who typically subscribes to conspiracy theories, but I strongly suspect a conspiracy. I was planning on using that hour — from 7:30 until 8:30 — for a couple of important tasks. A shower, for one. And breakfast, for another. I might even have brushed my teeth, and maybe combed my hair.
Who knows what could have been accomplished?
But the hour had totally disappeared. Vanished. Never to be seen again.
Now, you could make the argument that my phone and my computer were incorrect, and that my alarm clock was, in fact, the only accurate time-telling device in my house…and thus the hour was still available to me, to be used any way I chose to utilize it.
You would be wrong. The hour actually did disappear. All of the clocks in all of the businesses downtown confirmed that, yes, one hour of my life had in fact vanished into the black hole of Daylight Savings Time.
This has happened to me before, and I have always written it off as an illusion. “The hour didn’t actually disappear,” I would tell myself. “It’s just been moved to the first Sunday in November.”
But now that I’m older and wiser, and also more cynical, I’m feeling ticked off. Who in their right mind would trade an hour in March — with 20 inches of fresh snow at Wolf Creek Ski Area — for an hour in early November? Doesn’t seem like a fair trade.
And, being older and wiser, I’m also wondering if the hour in November is actually the same hour that I lost in March? Or was there a clever substitution made? Like when the Pagosa High School football team puts in their second string, during the fourth quarter. Not all hours were created equal, regardless of what the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
And it’s not just an emotional feeling of getting deprived of one hour of my life. There’s the biological impact as well.
I always eat lunch at 12 noon. Always. It’s one of my cherished habits. But yesterday, when 12 noon rolled around — the ‘pretend’ 12 noon — I wasn’t even a tiny bit hungry. But it was time to eat lunch, so I ate lunch. The food tasted lousy, and I left half of it on the plate. I thought about maybe putting the leftovers in the fridge, but I realized that 12 noon is going to come at the wrong time for the rest of the year until November. How many containers of leftovers do I imagine I can fit in my fridge? I would be maxed out by the middle of April.
So I am definitely not looking forward to my lunchtimes.
Folks, it doesn’t have to be this way. As the map below shows, most of the world thinks Daylight Savings Time is stupid. The stupid countries are shown in pink; the smart countries — which include about 80% of the world’s people — are shown in blue.
God bless Arizona, the only U.S. state to provide their taxpayers with a full 24-hour day on March 12.
Come on, Colorado! We don’t have to take this lying down.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.