I always love the autumn change in the clocks (bet you thought I was going to say leaves), when the nation as a whole jettisons an unsuspecting hour from our timepieces before going to bed. Oh! The joy that we feel when greeted by one more magical hour of rest for our wearied bones! But with the sweet comes the bitter: the dreaded spring months, the crank of the clock as we swing the minute hand up a full turn (or press a measly button), and the bleary, puffy-eyed days we have to endure before our bodies can get used to only seven hours of sleep (...if we're lucky).
Why do we have Daylight Savings Time? Well, that's a good question. After a few different people arbitrarily decided that we should wake up earlier to enjoy the better part of the day (thank you, William Willet) and Benjamin Franklin coined his now-cliche adage "Early to bed early to rise / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," the U.S. decided to follow the example of Europe (isn't that always the best decision??) and dictated from the federal level that all clocks were to change at 2:00 AM in the summer and the fall. Why? The effect was to reduce our dependence on artificial light in the evenings. But since the government can only change how we measure time and not time itself, we've ended up using just as much artificial light in the morning as we would have used at night.
This is why "oxymorons" such as Government Intelligence spring up in our chain mails.
As for the practical impact of DST, I always await the extra fall hour of sleep with the same feelings I had as a child approaching Christmas Eve: anxious, excited, and somehow unbelieving that such a fantastic occurrence could really happen in a single night.
Santa may not be real, but Daylight Savings Time is.
Unless you live in Arizona.
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