Fall Back on Sunday Morning

If it’s supposed to be Daylight Saving Time, why not do it in the daylight?

By close of this weekend we will have re-lived a full hour of life. We will be living a 25-hour day. I could actually really use an extra hour now. Probably more than at 2 am.

You think I make a specious argument? Sure, sure. We’re simply making it up for a loss last spring. But so much has transpired in the months between then and now. And I don’t wish to hoard it, as if next April I am not being cheated again with a shorter day, a 23-hour day.

Not such a rhetorical argument for the graveyard shift, nine hours long this Saturday. Indeed, timeanddate.com makes clear that specific language is called for when clocking the hours lost and gained with all of this DST business.

“Avoid confusion, when referring to time within this hour,” the site counsels, “it is important to mention whether it was before or after the change back to standard time. The day consists of 25 hours when DST ends.”

There it is.

Benjamin Franklin gets credit for suggesting the modern concept of resetting clocks to reduce use of “candles by rising earlier to make use of the morning sunlight,” but the concept is present in clockworks of ancient civilizations also, time and date reports.

Ben wasn’t convincing. The idea of actually setting clocks back failed to gain support in the modern world until World War I when Germany did it to conserve fuel. Britain soon followed. The US adopted its first DST policy in World War II.

But federal directives on when the time would change were not established until 1966 and still do not mandate states adopt the practice. Arizona does not which makes it one hour closer to Eastern Time come Sunday morning, November 1.

The St. Mary’s County Department of Emergency Services reminds everyone that the annual time change is the perfect opportunity to change batteries in smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends citizens replace smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector batteries annually and test the alarms every month.