Daylight Savings Time

This is this guy's only job. 

I think it's only fitting to talk about daylight savings time for a minute.  I wasted a perfectly good story about my personal experience this morning with daylight savings time by posting it as a Facebook status.  Honestly, it was such a brief encounter, a Facebook status makes sense instead of an entire blog post.  Also, I think that it was way funnier to me than it actually was as a story to tell your friends.  Anyway, if you don't like to read Facebook very often, as I don't like to do, basically, someone showed up to work an hour early this morning and couldn't get in the doors.  For the people that work here, there is a section of time where their access is restricted (I think it's 12:30 a.m. until about 5:15 a.m.)  So when I told her she couldn't get in because it was to early, I found it hilarious, even though it's really not all that funny.

I think I find if funny because I have always been afraid that I will also make that same mistake.  One of these days, I'm going to forget to set my clocks back or forward and I won't realize it.  It only happens twice a year, so I mean, what, I've only seen it happen 56 times in my whole life.  That's not a whole lot of times.  I've checked into the Kroger down the street from my apartment on Foursquare in the past 6 months more often than daylight savings time has occurred in my entire life.

But daylight savings time, oh what a weird thing we do.  Set the clocks back an hour in the fall, because we couldn't possibly stand to have all that sunlight in the evenings for four months?  Daylight savings time was put into place in the 70's during the oil crisis to save fuel.  If you don't have to turn your lamps on in your house until 9 o'clock instead of 8 o'clock, you will have your lights on for a shorter period of time before you go to bed, thus saving the amount of energy your house is sucking up.  Also, I'm pretty sure that the plan is that if there is more daylight in the evening, that equals you most likely to staying out shopping instead of heading home when the sun goes down.  Arizona doesn't observe DST, for the logical reason that it's hot as all Hell, and the last thing they need is more sunlight and heat late into the night.  That makes sense to me, because people sleep better when it's cool.  If the sun goes down sooner, the sooner it gets cool in your house.  But why oh why did Indiana opt out for all those years?  Just to be dicks?

My problem with DST is that in 2007, they extended it an entire month longer, making it from early to mid March until the first Sunday in November (today).  Okay, that's 237 out of the 365 days in a year that we are on a "special" daylight savings time.  A mere 127 days we're on "standard" time.  Why not just shift the whole thing to always be on "daylight savings time?"  I mean, now that it's switched, it's going to be getting dark here in Tennessee at around 5:30, I think.  That's ridiculous.  And by Christmas, it's more like 4:30, and it's pitch black outside.  There is no reason for that, in my opinion.  Especially after extending it back in 07, it's a blink of an eye that were on this so-called "standard time."  It's not a special thing if DST last two thirds of the whole year.  Might as well make it all of the time.  I think it would help everyone out.  There would be more business activity later into the day and there would be less seasonal depression due to lack of sunlight.

Another problem I have with "daylight savings time" is that we're not saving any daylight, there is no such thing. It's just darker in the morning.  There is still the same amount of daylight, it's just not out when it's convenient for you people.  Extended evening daylight time would be the appropriate title for this event.  Who are we saving this dreaded daylight from, anyway?  But hey, we saved some daylight for a while, and it was fun, but now it's time for daylight wasting time!  That's what they should call it.  Daylight wasting time.