We’re Springing Forward Already?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe it’s spring yet and the calendar says that we should forward our clocks one hour this coming Saturday night. Did I miss a memo or something? We should have at least a month more of premature darkness. I don’t mind Daylight Savings Time at all, it’s just that it’s a little early this year. Was a law passed or something?

For about a month now I’ve been reading about how the early DST will wreak havoc with many of our electronic devices. The warnings don’t pose the dire threat that the Y2K concern did, but I’m leaving nothing to chance and plan on sleeping with the family Saturday night in our abandoned Y2K shelter that I only recently abandoned. In fact, I just got back from the store where I stocked up on SPAM, powdered milk, water, cans of soup, etc. You know, just the essentials – like Twinkies. I also rigged up the satellite connection so I can watch the NASCAR race Sunday morning…assuming there is one. I figure that if the space/time continuum has been ruined by our altering of time, I’ll be safe in my bunker. As Y2K proved, the bunker can sustain us for at least 6…years.

If we survive Saturday night, there is a good side and a bad side to this early clock turning. Let’s focus on the good first. Instead of the usual week or so that you can milk being late for work and blaming it on your clocks not springing forward, now you get about five weeks! There are the four weeks because the change came early and the normal one-week grace period after the change. That’s certainly a positive, don’t you think. It also provides us with an extra month of still getting home while the sun is out. Getting home at six at night when it’s pitch black outside always makes the workday seem much longer than it actually is. Of course, sitting in a cubicle does the same thing, but I think I’ve pretty well documented that in my posts over the last 9 months. I definitely plan on taking advantage of having all of this extra daylight when I get home. It may not seem like a big deal, but I’ll enjoy the simple things like playing catch with Lucy and Ethel, using the old charcoal BBQ, walking the dog and whacking the ground with a shovel in my three-year mission to rid my yard of gophers. Yes my friends, a sun-ripened evening is a fine, fine time.

Enough of the bliss brought on by the early Daylight Savings Time, there is the downside that I feel I should caution you about. Experts believe that many of our simpler time keeping devices will not be able to cope with the early time change. Some of these devices are VCRs, DVD players and TiVo. TiVo? Well great! Now how am I going to record my 25 season pass programs like Barney Miller reruns and Rachael Ray’s seven different Food Network series? I guess I can just record the show before and after the one I want and extend the before and after recording time for each? That should about cover it, although I can see myself fast forwarding or rewinding through a lot of stuff I didn’t intend on recording. Well now that I think about it, that’s not convenient at all!

Since Daylight Savings Time was started earlier and extended longer, it will forever change one of childhood’s favorite holidays. No, I’m not talking about Columbus Day, I mean Halloween. Daylight Savings will now end the first weekend of November instead of the last weekend in October. I guess that means gone forever are the spooky nights and eerie darkness where the poorly lit streets are overrun with ghouls, ghosts, goblins and Barney the dinosaur. It’ll be like someone turned on the lights in the Haunted House or Pirates of the Caribbean rides at Disneyland (well actually, that might be pretty cool). We will save money on flashlight batteries and little votive candles for our pumpkins though. Oh yeah, I suppose it’s safer for kids out on the streets that night too. Whatever…

So, there you have it. I hope I have prepared your for our early Daylight Savings Time conversion. If everything goes well Saturday night, you can expect me at work around 10:30 Monday morning. If it doesn’t, feel free to swing by ‘the bunker.” I’ll make sure we have enough SPAM on the grill and plenty of reruns of Gilligan’s Island loaded into the clock-less Betamax VCR. If that doesn’t work, I guess we can always perform skits…