The Persistence of Time

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Fucking Bush!

Pardon my language — I try not to swear, neither in this blog nor in real life, but that guy has really annoyed me now. For now, forget the war (or is it a “skirmish” or “conflict” like Vietnam was?), forget the oil, forget the right-wing evangelicals–they’re all large nebulous concepts that don’t always affect my everyday life. Today, I got my first taste of the experience that will be known as The Effing “New” Daylight Saving Time Annoyance.

You see, back in 2005, Shrub signed The Energy Policy Act of 2005, deciding that it would be in my best interest to shift the start and end dates of DST, giving everyone a few more weeks of “savings.” Now, I am not sure what world he lives in, but my world has this old invention called the incandescent bulb. In fact, the invention is so old that it is slowly being replaced by energy efficient variants like the fluorescent bulb or the LED lamp. Saving daylight might have been a great thing in Ben Franklin’s time, but these days, it is more of an annoyance than anything. And really, how ARE you supposed to SAVE daylight? What’s the going interest rate on daylight? Can you get better savings by putting it into a CD or mutual fund?

Sorry. Anyway, back to the annoyances. Again, it is apparently in my best interest to shift the Daylight Saving dates around, but the reality of the situation is far different. Computers and cellphones are okay as long as you have the latest patches and firmware, but what about the CLOCKS?! I have two alarm clocks that auto-set themselves by special radio signals. You program in your timezone, they get the GMT date and time over the radio, and use the timezone and date (for DST changes) to calculate local time. Normally, I never have to think about them. If the power goes out, they remember their timezone and auto-set themselves when the power returns. When the clocks change due to DST, they know. Because the clocks changed last night on a new schedule, I had to manually set them. This, in and of itself, is not an annoyance. If I had regular non-fancy clocks, I would have to do this anyway. News services and websites were filled with reminders about the time change. The real annoyance comes in a couple of weeks… when the clocks set themselves based on the original DST schedule. Very likely, there will be little-to-no media fanfare about this “undo” change, yet I will have to remember to do it. Not only will I have to remember to do it, but I will have to use the old DST calculations to know ahead of time out what days it should be done on because all of the current DST timetables have the new schedules.

“But wait!” you say. “Just disable the DST shifting on your clocks! After all, doesn’t Arizona or something not follow DST?” Yeah. I wish it was that easy. The instruction manuals for the clocks (yes, I keep all instruction manuals) say that in these cases, you’ll just have to manually adjust.

America! Fuck yeah! Liberating the oil and saving the time! I await a future law requiring people to change what side of the road they drive on based on the current Daylight Saving Time. I’m sure it will also be in my best interest.

Posted in: Dear Diary

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