Daylight savings time. The time of year when your internal clock is screwed up for the next two weeks, and you don’t know when to eat, sleep, or how long you’ve actually been staring at that blinking cursor on your empty Microsoft Word document. Every year, the debate as to whether or not this archaic practice is worth keeping arises, and every year, we all seem to agree that it is a nonsensical tradition that serves most of us no good, except for a ready-made excuse for the foreseeable future as to why we aren’t on time for class.
But, instead of knocking it, let’s take a look at some of the positive reasons to keep ye olde tradition alive.
Reason one: That hour taken away from your precious sleep means that you get to enjoy another cup of coffee! That hot cup of java may just give you the bounce in your step you need to make it from your bed to your couch to study (by which I mean nap on top of your notes).
Reason two: The hour lost means that instead of staring at the unbroken spine of all the expensive books you haven’t opened, or even pouring over the notes scribbled between the doodles on your looseleaf, you can instead spend it running around your house, trying to re-adjust all the clocks on all your appliances.
Reason three: Those multiple trips around your house will up your step count for the day! Yay healthy choices!
Reason four: The clock in your car will finally be correct again. Or, close to it.
Reason five: That glass of wine you need to wind down after drinking all that coffee to stay awake can be consumed an hour sooner. Please pass the rosé.
Thanks to a small town in what is now Thunder Bay, we enjoy the pleasure of having our internal time clock be completely reset twice a year. They were doing it first, before the rest of the world decided on implementing this nonsensical tradition. This is the one time Canada needs to actually say “sorry.” Even Benjamin Franklin wrote it as a joke in the 1770s, stating that the Parisiens could save money on lamp oil by rising with the sun. Even though, apparently, no one took him seriously about it. Then, almost 200 years later, BAM, Germany decided to make it a thing to help the war effort in World War I. Another fantastic decision made by Germany.
Just be appreciative that you don’t have as many clocks as the Queen, whose staff spends over 50 hours winding clocks. Or that you aren’t Chris Martin, from Coldplay, whose great-great-grandfather was William Willett, who made a lovely pamphlet that helped make daylight savings time more popular. What a legacy to leave.
But seriously though, as much as daylight savings time is a terrible invention, and should go the way of Clippy, the twerpy assistant in the old Microsoft Word (are any of you old enough to even remember him?), we have to suck it up, and accept that it’s here for the foreseeable future. I think I need a bigger coffee cup…
