Saving Daylight. Image credit: Liz Fagoli
Are we being duped about daylight saving time? Where’s the extra hour of daylight when we wake up early and experience an extra hour of darkness?
This Sunday morning (very early; 02:00) the clocks go forward by an hour to “Daylight Saving Time” – or to save even more time… “DST“.
Instead of getting up at 7 am, we get up at what used to be 6 am (the new 7 am), so it feels too early.
And in the evening, instead of staying up late and watching netflix (or reading the latest posts of T2TT 😉 ) we’ll be ‘forced’ to call it a day and crawl into bed an hour earlier.
Maybe it’s for our own good; as the saying goes:
“An hour before midnight is worth 2 in the morning.”
And funnily enough, it’s at 2 in the morning when we embark upon the first hour of daylight saving time. 2 am becomes 3 am, we lose an hour from our life and we call it an hour saved.
Is this the nonsensical concept of “saving” that shops try to lure us into, where not spending fictional money is apparently saving it? Don’t spend 700 euros, but pay the regular price of 600 and “save” 100.
What a load of crap! Where’s that 100 quid? It doesn’t exist!
Maybe it’s like our extra daylight hour. It’s supposed to save us from an hour of darkness (so an extra hour of daylight) but we experience an extra hour of darkness when we wake up an hour earlier in the morning!
It’s a misnomer – there’s no saving!
Maybe it’s some sort of conspiracy. Apart from the fact that a lot of computers, tablets, laptops and phones etc. apply daylight saving time automatically, the time shift is shamefully hidden and tucked away in the early hours of the morning. It’s almost as if we’re not supposed to know about it happening at all…
The Dutch train company might understand the sentiment. It steals time from me and would have me believe that it’s not the case; my train is 10 minutes late, for example so I miss my connection and need to wait for the next train which runs every half hour. It duly turns up and I arrive at my final destination 30 minutes late.
As far as the train company is concerned I’ve suffered no delay because only 1 train was running late, and because it was by less than 30 minutes, it doesn’t count as a delay.
I don’t dare to try telling that to my boss…
Maybe it would be better if both trains were delayed, or to have one train delayed by a ‘significant’ amount of time (where ‘significance’ is measured by the train company). But then I’d be forced to wait an hour on the cold platform in the midst of meteorological elements, screeching babies and…oh actually, everyone on that busy and over-crowded platform is screeching and pushing and shoving.
I can’t help thinking that the train company is stealing that hour from me. It’s a wasted hour; an hour spending it in a way I had neither planned or wanted.
Where’s my hour?
I’m more sympathetic with air travel, flying east from one time zone and into another one hour earlier. Sounds a bit like Stephen King’s The Langoliers where time was being eaten up behind a flying plane.
A Daylight saving hour for our favour and convenience! Pah! I spit on you, DST!
I’m not alone. Perhaps it will come as no surprise that nearly 3.7 million respondents in a public survey voted to put an end to seasonal clock changes (source: www.timeanddate.com).
Ironically, “…EU Member States called for more time before putting an end to the practice.” (!) (same source, my emphasis).
I’ll try not to lose sleep over it, but I’m sure I will! Then again, it may not be so bad. If there’s any truth in the expression, I think I can get away with going to bed only half an hour early – that will give me my hour back after midnight, right?
Paul
You might also like to visit or like time2timetravel on Facebook.
lets stop the clock changing, just get to work later in winter and earlier in summer would do the job (and start school later in winter as well!) 🙂