Daylight Savings Time

by Horace J. Digby
Winner of the Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor


I can never remember which way to change the clocks. Some people gain an hour each fall. It takes me more than an hour to figure out what time it is. I know the rule, "Spring forward. Fall Back." That's great in theory, but it doesn't work.

Let's say you have an eight o'clock meeting that gets moved forward one hour. That would be seven o'clock. Right? Forward means ahead. Shouldn't daylight time work the same way?

And when we "fall back" to . . . well, I guess it's called, "daylight losing time," shouldn't we move the clocks back? If your eight o'clock flight gets moved back one hour, it leaves at nine o'clock, right? Not seven o'clock.

At our house my son Adam sets the clocks (except of course the ones I personally use). This spring he moved them from eight o'clock back to nine o'clock. It was definitely a "spring forward" situation, so why didn't he move the clocks forward to seven. I figured our clocks were two hours off. But like any right thinking man would do in this situation, I asked my wife. And like any right thinking women, my wife told me I had it wrong. Sharon pointed out that our "atomic clock," which gets time directly from the official-government-atomic-radio waives coming out of Denver, Colorado, agreed with Adam. She was pretty they were right.

Sharon also told me the time had actually changed at two a.m., but she wasn't sure if it changed at "the old two a.m." or "the new two a.m." I worried about that too, until Sharon finally admitted she was just making fun of me. Even so, the daylight-savings-time puzzle was solved, in just under two minutes.

That's when I saw the message on my computer saying its clock had reset itself. I expected it to agree with Adam, Sharon and the "atomic clock," but it didn't. The computer said it was seven o'clock. It also said we were in Tijuana.

I thought it was nine, or possibly ten o'clock. My wife, my son and the "atomic clock" said it was eight o'clock. But my computer, which gets its information directly from the richest man in the world, said it was seven o'clock. Who should I believe?

So I did what I do every year, which is, arrange to be everywhere an hour early. It only takes a week or two for a general consensus to emerge. Then I set my clocks.

I hope you guessed right with your clocks. But if you got it wrong, don't worry. You'll get to try again in six months.

-- Horace J. Digby --
hjdigby@lexingtonfilm.com

Copyright © 2006 Lexington Film, LLC. All rights reserved.