Saving Time

I wanted to post this two days earlier but couldn't because my circadian clock is all messed up. Once I'm reminded that we are again switching our clocks, I start to fret about how the time change will affect me. No, not really. But, I just bet there are people who are sensitive enough for time changes to stress them out.

Time change doesn't affect me much anymore, as I'm retired now and my time is my own. I no longer punch a time clock. Actually, I never have literally punched a clock. But, even if you only figuratively "punch a time clock," when you are employed outside of your home, your work hours do not belong to you. Back then I tried to sell my time to the highest benevolent bidder. Once sold, my bidder could then bid me to do whatever I had contracted to do with my hours during that appointed time. My bidder could use my time to better the world. Or my bidder could just use my hours to fetch thorns for him and generally make his self-complicated life easier.

I once assisted a gifted, artistic, brilliant, and a tad bit eccentric priest at a Catholic university. One afternoon he rushed into my office, “Put your coat on, grab a scissors, oh, and maybe an envelope.” “What’s up?” I asked as he ushered me, hatless and gloveless to the elevator. “You’re going to pick some thorns. I saw some bushes with them on campus sometime back. Look over behind the Chapel.” It was windy, subzero and the Chapel overlooked a frozen Lake Michigan corner of the campus. “How many thorns do you need?” I asked over my shoulder as he directed me toward the brush. “About 200” he called out as he headed directly back to the warmth of his office to review his lecture notes.

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The most common reason I've heard over the years as to why we utilize daylight saving time, and then don't utilize it again for months, is that it helps farmers. When we first relocated from the city to a rural farm area, I spoke to the farmer who, in his spare time, we employ to maintain/clean our furnace. When I asked him about "daylight savings time" he looked at me like I was an alien being from some distant galaxy. Then, he patiently explained that it made no difference to him, nor his cows, what hour the department of transportation attached to his day, he still had 19 hours of work to do in a 16-hour period. Period. The amount of daylight per 24 hours is not subject to human regulation. And thank goodness for that! Right? Can you imagine? Holy smokes!

The oversight of time zones was assigned to the Department of Transportation because time standards were first instituted by the railroad industry. Once I adapt to whichever time change we are in, I'm quite content. But still, my question to the DOT is: "Why the heck can't we just end the madness and pick one time and stick to it?"

"Because!" people tell me there are reasons. Like? Like, the university professor who said, "Do you want children waiting for the school bus in the dark!?" Or the earnest graduate student who urgently presses for the time change saving "tons of energy" by not having to use electricity and fossil fuels to light and heat our homes and offices during that precious hour.

The dog we are dog-sitting doesn't understand the change, so she'll be expecting dinner at her regular time. And she may, for a few days anyway, wake at her usual time. She won't get it, but she'll adjust. And discounting dogs and farm animals, what about people like the character Dustin Hoffman played in Rain Man? He'd be so distraught by a twice-per-year change in his routine, wouldn't he? Do we care? Well, I kind of care.

The human circadian clock is designed to gradually adjust over the course of a season, with sleep and wake times slowly changing in response to the varying intensity and length of sunlight. But that's not good enough for us. Twice per year we amp up or tone down the change to either lose or gain one hour of sleep – shifting our internal clocks much faster than nature intended.

I keep a radio-controlled "atomic" clock at my bedside.  My clock has a radio inside, which receives a signal that comes from Colorado, or somewhere, somewhere where an actual atomic clock is located. My clock, when the battery is fresh and working, always displays the correct time, down to the exact second. I never have to adjust it. When we transition from standard time to daylight saving time my clock "springs forward" one hour and when DST is finished it automatically "falls back" one hour. But humans and animals are not like my radio-controlled clock and we do not automatically change. Just ask any parent, who struggles to get their children to readjust their little internal human clocks. Might it be easier for schools to have seasonal winter and summer hours, like stores already utilize to accommodate holiday sales, then for everyone to change their clocks?

I'm not certain how much energy we save by employing a time-change. I think I read somewhere that it is negligible. Besides, there is already about an hour difference in sunrise on opposite ends of the time zone spectrums. So, for such areas, like the one near our former Chicago home, the state border, in this case Illinois/Indiana, is the cut-off. Many people who live near the state line commute between states in two different time zones. How are they saving energy?

We've dammed and rerouted rivers, we've man-made lakes, we level hills and bore through mountains. You can see how we might think we can control the flow of time. I love the quote, supposedly attributed to a native american, probably one of my wise ancestors, that goes something like this, "Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and thus have a longer blanket."