Ann
Ipock
Humorist,
author, speaker
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Myrtle Beach Herald
Area
Business Journal
Daylight savings time should be called daylight ravings time
by Ann Ipock April
14, 2006
For many folks (including me) Daylight Savings Time is more like Daylight
Ravings Time. It makes some of us raving mad—since it causes us
to reset not only our watches, clocks, cell phones, computers, answering
machines and who-knows-how-many appliances. And who has TIME to do that?
It kind of misses the point, if you know what I mean.
And yet, if we miss one little setting, it can throw off the whole day.
And speaking of thrown off, my stomach always is. When noontime rolls
around, I can’t decide if I should’ve been hungrier an hour
earlier, an hour later, or right then and there.
Don’t even mention bedtime or morning arising.
I always felt like I was the only one who had so much trouble adjusting—springing
forward in the spring and falling back in the fall. Who ever thought of
that silly idiom? It confused me to think of springing forward—does
that mean you go from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. or 2 a.m. to 1 a.m.? And who in
the heck decided on that magical hour of 2 a.m.; say, instead of 1 a.m.
or 4 a.m.? Y’all know as good as I do that no one in their right
mind is going to stay up until 2 a.m. to reset all those “time keepers;”
so why not just make it 10 p.m.? That way, night owls and early birds
can “reset” all at the same time, like one big happy family!
Last night my early-bird girlfriend Madelene called me at 10:20 p.m. (DST)
and I nearly fainted. She is the only one of us on our Annual Girls’
Getaway who you can expect to fall asleep at 8:30—no matter how
much fun we are having or where we are—and wake up at 5:30. It doesn’t
even matter if it’s a rainy, dreary, sleep-in kind of day or not—she’s
perky before daylight. Don’t you just hate that? I thought she must
have some earth-shaking news for me when she called; but no, she said.
She just wanted to “chat.”
When I mentioned the time to her, she said, “Oh! Is it that late?
I’m all mixed up with this crazy Daylight Savings Time.” Coincidence
or not, after that, she then yawned all through the conversation.
When I delivered my books today to a local gift shop, I was chatting with
the manager and an employee who was unpacking boxes. They were discussing
the extra hour the employee “accidentally” worked on Sunday
because even though she reset her clocks and watch, she went by the store’s
credit card machine time, which was wrong and still was even today.
That was because they were having trouble resetting it. Imagine that!
The manager then said that a similar story (in reverse) had happened to
her. She was sitting around on a Sunday morning, drinking her coffee and
enjoying the newspaper, when her phone rang. It was her boss, casually
asking what she was doing. “Oh, just enjoying my coffee,”
she said. Her boss said she might want to think about coming to work since
she was nearly an hour late.
But the best story I heard that ended with a phrase I’ll never forget
is this: A lady who was the activities director of an assisted living
facility was discussing Daylight Savings Time with a resident one day.
This lady, who was always so sweet and congenial, had an opinion about
it. She said, “I don’t like it when we switch times.”
The director asked her why not. She replied, “It’s too much
sun on my tomatoes.” Now, who could argue with that?