Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time.  Spring Forward.  Fall Back.  Gain an hour.  Lose an hour.  Daylight Saving Time.  Why?  Why is that a thing and how do we stop it?  Daylight Saving Time is the bane of our existence.  Let's look a little deeper into this archaic tradition.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

First, It's Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time.  I absolutely hate when people say it incorrectly.  Yes, it's incorrect and yes, you're an idiot for arguing.

Now, let's look at the history of the program.  You probably think it has to do with farming.  It doesn't.  Germany actually started the program in 1916 in an effort to "save fuel" during wartime.  We, in the United States, jumped on the bandwagon in 1918, about a year after we joined the war.  The same, fuel saving reason was given for the enactment of the program.

Guess what?  That's a lie too.  A major sponsor of the bill was the Chamber of Commerce.  Why?  They saw people shopping more if they got off work while it was still light out.  The sports industries also saw booms in sales because of the extra hour of usable daylight.

Yup.  That's right.  Leave it to American corporations to turn something into a money maker.  It's Valentine's Day all over again!  Fast forward after several decades of some cities celebrating Daylight Saving Time and other, nearby cities not celebrating.  Yup, you could literally drive a few miles and be off by an hour.  In 2005, we started having 8 months of Daylight Saving Time.  8 months.

Look, I, personally, prefer November to March, when it gets dark at 5 pm, but frankly, I don't care which way we do it, but let's pick a time and stick with it year round.  Arizona doesn't use Daylight Saving Time and they...wait...bad example.  Arizona sucks.  Hawaii doesn't use Daylight Saving Time and I think we can all agree that Hawaii is awesome.

The point being that it is 2016.  We save energy in many other ways.  We shop online 24 hours a day.  Lighting has come a long way and night games are awesome.  I think we can stop living in the past with this silly practice that makes us all late for work/church/whatever in the Spring and all incredibly angry that we arrive early to work/church/whatever in the Fall.

For now, we're stuck with it so remember to change your clocks BACK one hour before you fall asleep on Saturday night...Oh wait, it's 2016, most of the clocks we own do that for us automatically at 2 am.  Never mind.  But you can potentially save your life and change the batteries in all of your smoke and carbon dioxide detectors.  OK OK, so Daylight Saving Time does serve one good purpose.