Watch out, feds, we're clockwise to your daylight `saving' scheme
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Between now and Sunday you'll see countless reminders to set the clocks back. But why, exactly, are we poised to switch off daylight-saving time and move on to the dour standard time? Doesn't November need the sunshine more than July? What was Benjamin Franklin thinking?
And that extra hour we supposedly ``get''? It was ours to begin with, from last April. And when we do get it back, guess what? It's handed over without so much as a minute of interest by the Department of Transportation (inexplicably, the DOT's the DST overseer). We'd never put up with that rate of return from a bank.
Where's the paper trail? Who knows what kind of irregularities are going on in Washington? I suspect there's some sort of daylight embezzlement. I mean, we've been ``saving'' for years. Shouldn't there be enough by now?
It's like the Mass Pike tolls. They paid for construction and upkeep years ago. There's a daylight slush fund somewhere, kept, of course, in an offshore account in the (noticeably sunny) Cayman Islands.
Here's an idea: Once the inevitable presidential-election challenges are over (I'm thinking March), let's sic the lawyers on standard time. I see a class-action suit filed by: people suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder; the parents of young, early rising children; and dieters. (The whole country, in other words.)
Should the suit fail, and we're forced to continue with standard time, at the very least they should tack on the extra hour in the evening, when the kids are asleep.
Dieters would prefer that, too. The hours between the bowl of high-fiber cereal and protein-packed lunch can be very long, and nothing's more depressing than blowing your calorie budget early before noon. It's worse than the a.m. cocktail, even.
Another thing: We shouldn't all get the hour at the same exact time. If everyone has an extra hour, then no one does. More is simply expected of all uf us. It's like e-mail, speeding up the pace of business.
The extra hours should be spread out, allocated by lottery maybe, or sold like time shares on eBay, or divvied according to odd-even license plates, like in the gas shortage of the '70s. Think how sweet an extra hour would be on a day when everyone else was sweating to get it all done in a mere 24.
It's almost enough to make me want to retract what I've written and fight for the continuation of standard time. But I'm not sure. I'll have to sleep on it.
