Daylight Wasting Time Delayed

Today marked the beginning of what I call Daylight Wasting Time. (I trust that you know that by now, or you've been an hour early to everything so far today.) I'm not a fan of the extra hour of daylight in the early morning; as I said in the earlier post,

I think the really depressing part of DWT is that it almost always gets dark before I'm done teaching now. It seems to me that if you don't finish work until after dark, you've worked too long. In a way, I know my days are too long, but at least I can hide behind a little denial if I get home while the sun is still out. DWT blows that all out of the water, and I'm forced to come to terms with my workaholic self. Bleh.

But it was interesting this year to have the start of DWT delayed by one more week. Some people think that this was brought on by the candy manufacturers, who wanted there to be an extra hour of daytime for trick-or-treating. And surely the retail merchants appreciated another week with some daylight left at the end of the workday; that's bound to result in more people going shopping on weekdays.

There were some interesting technological glitches, though, as not every computer system "got the word" about the one-week-later changeover. I had a friend who was an hour late to lunch with me last Sunday because his clock auto-updated a week too soon; I also noticed that the clock tower at Firewheel was running an hour behind last week as well. And something went weird on my cell phone network today, as I had to disable the "auto-update" feature on my phone until just now in order to get the time to read properly.

Making this time change is no small undertaking at Casa de Kev; I had to change my watch, my two alarm clocks, the VCR, the kitchen range, the microwave, the clock on the mantelpiece, the living room light timer, the landscape light timer and the clock in the car. (The computer updated itself, and as I said, the cell phone should have done so.) While it was unseasonably warm today--which really made the early darkness feel weird--the oddest thing I did all day was use the headlights on my way home at 5:00 p.m.

So a little survey here:

• Which time period do you prefer, Daylight Saving Time or Daylight Wasting TIme? (Yeah, no prejudice at all in that question. Heh.)


• How many devices did you have to change manually today (or last night)?


• Did you remember to do so on time? Have you ever forgotten about either the fall or spring time change?

If nothing else, the extra hour of sleep was enjoyable. Hope you spent the 25th hour doing something nice as well.

UPDATE: Here's a time-change primer from MSNBC.

One more reason to dislike Daylight Wasting Time: A study shows that pedestrians walking during evening rush hour are three times more likely to be killed by a car during the first few weeks after the time change. (It's not the darkness itself that causes this, but rather the adjustment to the darkness.)

Scary headline of the week: Man gets probation for assault with pickle.