Saving Time

My renovations have hit a couple of bumps - my schedule and the Congress-induced torture we call Daylight Saving.

Sunday morning was not a happy one for me. I set my bedside clock ahead an hour on Saturday night, went to bed very early, and zonked out. My alarm went off at 6. I hit it before it could wake the Big Lug, stumbled to the bathroom with my glasses askew and my eyes unfocused (it felt so early) and then to the kitchen to make coffee. When it began its restorative drip, complete with the Fragrance of the gods, I happened to glance at the microwave.

4:12, it said. Just past the fog in my head I suddenly remembered my wonderful radio was tapped into the Big Chronograph of the world - it knows when DST starts, and I'd double-dipped.

I'm wiped out.

I've never fully understood this Spring and Autumn dipsy-doodle we do with our clocks. I'm told it saves energy, but that doesn't make sense to me - the procedure has been in practice for almost a hundred years (originally Benjamin Franklin's idea, for heaven's sake). Correct me if I'm wrong, but energy wasn't really an issue back then, was it? Seriously, they wanted to save on whale oil? Coal? Tallow? The sun still rises and sets no matter what the Grandfather in the hallway says, and there's still less time between the two in the dead of winter, more in the peak of summer. And there's no proof we save anything anyway - based on personal observation, all the theoretical energy we might conserve from offices and schools is definitely squandered by millions of shivering/sweating Americans who believe they deserve their personal comfort bubble at home and in the car.

So why do we do it? Why not stay with Standard Time throughout the year? In our marvelous era of thermal chimneys and solar heating, of pushing for a greener world, why not just live with the natural rhythms instead of trying to (once again) bend nature to our collective will?

Why do we always try to fix something that isn't even broken?

I guess that's the real question haunting me today. We live in such a complicated world - most of my friends work for one governmental agency or another, and bureaucracies are the masters of reinvention for no reason. But what really got me was a call I had from my boss this morning - for some reason, the main office decided to try a new schedule thing this year, a 9 a.m. Saturday class. Now, you all know I yard sale in the spring. The old classes began at 10, which I could handle because I could get a lot in by then. But 9? Uh-uh. Even more, I'm only able to get Acid Trip here to help with the bigger stuff on Saturdays. So I warned her in December that come Spring (and only Spring) I would work later but not earlier.

Yet today she called and told me I'm "needed" for as many classes as I can cover - no one else can take the earlier classes, either, and, I suppose, I'm usually the biggest sucker.

So why did they alter the schedule in the first place? It wasn't broken, was it? Why do we as a species feel so compelled to change for change's sake?

And do I have the stones to stick to my more than ample warning and just say "no"?

I'll tell you Thursday.