Time to change the clocks again...

I hate Daylight Saving Time. No, loathe may be a better word. Seriously. For the life of me, I can't figure out how someone actually came up with this harebrained idea and why anyone would actually like it enough to actually do it.

I can imagine a bunch of people sitting around ruing how miserable it is in winter that the sun sets earlier. One of them (a fellow by the name of William Willett, in fact) pipes up, "Hey, I have an idea, let's just pretend that it's an hour later than it is, so tomorrow at this time, it will actually be an hour earlier!" The others agree, and so they go about their business, pretending that it is an hour later than it actually is.

So far, we just have a few nutjobs walking around with their clocks set an hour ahead of everyone else's. But somehow, these nutjobs managed to convince government to go along with them (okay, maybe that part isn't so hard to figure out), which in turn imposed this lunacy on everyone else. Why weren't these people mercilessly mocked and shamed back into normalcy?

So now, we have Daylight Saving Time. We just sprung forward, which means that we're pretending it's an hour later now. What it really means is that once a year, everyone has an automatic excuse to be late for work. Some of them probably forget to set their clocks back. All of them claim to have forgotten. Everyone else looks at them in sympathy and agrees, "Yes, that's understandable." It also means that the sun doesn't come up until around 7:00 in the morning where I live. Since I work the night shift, that means that I'm really tired and driving home in the dark just when traffic is getting heavy with the morning rush hour. Since I work with a lot of people in different time zones, it also means that I have to get used to writing EDT after all times instead of EST, and then changing back in six months.

All of that sounds like minor inconveniences, but what really irritates me is that they're caused by an utterly ludicrous concept. Not too long ago, someone commented on Slashdot that noon is in theory supposed to be the time of day when the sun is more or less as high in the sky as it will get, and midnight is, well, the midpoint of the night. Not any more, we have government to redefine the concepts of noon and midnight. Now, they're just arbitrary times of day, like 9:17am or 6:38pm. If we don't like when those times are in reality, we can just arbitrarily change them!

Well, I think that's stupid. I think that if you don't like when the sun rises and sets, you should complain to God for making it that way instead of trying to dink around with my clocks. You may think an extra hour of sunlight when you get home is nifty, but I hate that that I've lost an hour of sunlight in the morning, and I have nature and thousands of years of human history on my side.