As y’all know, I hate Daylight Savings Time. Hate it.
And the demonic DST gods know that I hate it, and they take it out on me. For instance, in recent years, it has started at randomly chosen, earlier and earlier dates. This enables them to do things like this to me:
On Sunday, my wife, who is from Memphis, flew there to visit her brothers and their families. I needed to get her to the airport by 6 a.m. Which I am more than happy to do. But the DST demons saw that, and immediately decided that would be the night when we lost an hour — because that’s the one weekend I would feel it the most.
Fine. No problem. I can take it as well as dish it out. I went back home from the airport and, after tossing and turning for about an hour and a half, went back to sleep and slept past 11:30. (We had gone to Mass the evening before; it’s not like I was going all heathen or anything.)
Then this morning, at 5:28 a.m. — which in a rational universe (a universe in which everyone understands that noon is at the height of the sun) is actually 4:28 a.m. — my phone goes “DING!” So I pick it up, expecting to be told something important, and I get this:
Really? You had to wake me up to make sure I knew I could have another cup of coffee if I wanted it?
Yeah, I know — I could turn off the notifications for that particular news app. But I turn them on so that I can get timely notification of actual news events. Not so that I can be waked up and told stuff that could most definitely wait until later!
As it happens, I already knew that it was OK to have that second or third cup of coffee. And thanks to this, I needed it today…
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I set my iPhone so the ringer is off 10 PM-7AM, so it won’t make any noise except for alarm clock or when my “favorite” contacts call.
Well, yeah, if you want to get all tricky and technical…
Personally I love DST, I wish we’d stay on it all year. The work day flies by.
I am surprised, as I am sure most here are… you subscribe to notifications from a FOX station so you’ll be up on real news. What will your NPR buddies think of you now?
How does anyone over the age of 18 sleep until 11:30? The older I get the earlier I enjoy getting up. I’m 50 right now and 6:15 is about where I’m comfortable now. It was a little difficult this morning but by the end of the week my biological clock will be adjusted. I don’t know if I could force myself to stay in bed past 9:00 much less 11:30.
Howard, I’d be like you if afternoon newspapers hadn’t died.
P.M. papers had to be out on the street by lunchtime, which mean the last pages heading from composing to the pressroom by just after 11.
That meant, early in my career when I was the slot man on the copy desk, getting in at 5:30. Later, when I was news editor, I went in at the comparatively late hour of 7.
P.M. papers were the best — the news was fresh. Sometimes what you could read over lunch was only an hour old. By contrast almost nothing in a morning paper is less than 12 hours old when you get it, and most of it quite a bit older. P.M. journalists had to hustle, and it imbued the paper with extra energy.
I don’t know why the marketplace chose to prefer the morning paper, but it did.
So I made the switch myself to morning papers in 1985, and spent decades on that schedule. Start the day about 10, reach the peak intensity of deadline at 6 p.m. stay as needed to 8, 9, 10 or later — sometimes to as late as 2 a.m.
My body got rewired to that over the decades. And if I stay up particularly late or have my sleep interrupted, I can easily sleep past 10 or 11 on a weekend…
Oh, and most people are with you on DST.
As one person said to me on Facebook, “Why does everybody hate DST? It doesn’t get dark until 9:00 pm! That’s fantastic.”
My response: I hate it because it doesn’t get dark until 9 p.m.
I enjoy the evening. I don’t feel like I can relax until after the sun goes down. And if it goes down at 9, you only have an hour or so before you have to think seriously about going to bed, only to get up in the DARK in the morning…
DST makes me feel rushed. I like to look at a clock and discover I have MORE time left, not less…
I don’t understand the “lost an hour” mentality, the day is still 24 hours long, not 23 hours long. Black out shades are less than $50 and will block out 100% of the natural sunlight. It’s like sleeping in a hotel where if you don’t look at the clock you likely don’t know if it’s 3:00 am or 3:00 pm. Go to bed 15 minutes early, get up 15 minutes early, you still get the same amount of sleep and no reason to feel rushed.
1: DST is not, not, not a good thing- especially outside the bounds of true summer(try telling a 4 year
old it’s bedtime when the sun is shining),and
2: News feeds and their seemingly perpetual dings have about jumped the shark with this non-techie.
Yes, that is a huge reason why DST is bad — it’s tough to get kids to bed at the time they need to. Which points to how unnatural it is. Children, uncorrupted by our artificial constructs of time, are completely right to reject the idea that they should go to bed when the sun is up.
I don’t have that problem anymore unless the grandchildren are sleeping over, but it’s one of the strongest objections to this absurdity.
I had a great time playing with my four and half year old son and two year old daughter yesterday after work in our backyard. We played t-ball, soccer, climbed and did slides, and generally enjoyed the day. This wouldn’t have been possible without DST, as I didn’t get home until 6:30PM or so. Even then, we had a good solid amount of daylight left. We even went for a family walk (down the street for a 100 yards and back) after we fed them an early dinner. The whole neighborhood was out walking and enjoying the sunlight after work. It’s brought my neighborhood outside, and we all visited a little.
Brad, I think you’re underestimating the communitarian nature of DST.
P.S. If you run your kids around and tire them out during the day, bed-time isn’t a big problem. I have the most trouble getting my son to go to bed when he’s been cooped up inside all the time.