Daylight Savings - What’s the deal?
Mark K March 9th, 2008
Today is the day that we “spring forward” - the first day of daylight savings. Since I’m a writer and a bread baker, I get up at 4:30 am and today it’s actually 3:30 - what most people would refer to as “the middle of the night”. I’m still doing my morning writing, though, but am not in a very charitable mood.
So what’s the deal with Daylight Savings? All my life I’ve been slavishly following the rules of changing my clock twice a year - if I can remember - and, like with many traditions, I don’t really know why we do them. I’ve always heard that the original idea behind daylight savings time was that this allowed farmers more daylight in order to complete their farming chores while it’s still light.
Now sitting here looking out my window at the pitch black dark, that seems like a ridiculous statement if there ever was one. Of course, I could easily take a few minutes to Google the subject and find out the real reason, but it seems much more appropriate for me to rant for a few minutes about why this is an absurd explanation:
1. If ever there was a group of people who are not dependent on clocks, it would seem to be the farmers. Assuming that you have a lot of work to do in the fields and assuming that the work requires daylight in order to be performed safely and efficiently, why would they possibly care what time the clock says while they are doing the work? It’s not like they’re punching time clocks!
2. What does “daylight savings” even mean? Let’s not fool ourselves - no one is actually saving any daylight here. No matter what Congress legislates, the amount of daily sunlight will remain the same regardless of what the clocks say.
3. As much as I admire and respect the farming profession, in this day and age there is an incredibly small percentage of people in the United States who farm for a living. Meanwhile the bakers of America are driving to work in the pitch dark, entering frigid, vacant buildings and groping in the dark, searching for light switches. All across America, they should be raising their flour-covered clenched fists and demanding that there should be an end to this draconian practice of “saving of daylight”! “Let there be morning light!” should be their battle cry!
Okay, I feel better now. Tomorrow I’ll do a little research and find out the real story behind daylight savings time and report back to all of you who will no doubt be sitting in the dark (or the light - maybe even on a tractor) awaiting an explanation. It probably has nothing to do with either farmers or bakers at which point I can always go back and delete this post.
- musings
- Comments(1)
I couldn’t agree more. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Daylight is finite. If we manipulate the clock by moving the hands forward or backwards,it makes no difference to the sun. If we arbitrarily say that there are Twenty five hours in the day, the sun will still move at the same rate and there will still be only be a finite amount of sun light. I think daylight savings time was invented by an ancestor of the guitar legend, Nigel Tufnel, who pioneered volume indexing but designing his amplifier dials that “go to eleven”. When questioned about his theory and asked<”why not just make ten louder?”, Mr. Tufnel’s response put the issue to rest with pure, crystaline logic: “Ours go to eleven.” I rest my case.