Daylight Savings Time starts today.  The friendly reminder is still to “Spring Forward” so you know that this is the time the clocks go forward one hour… nevermind the fact that DST day now occurs in winter.  DST originally began in late April, then was moved to the first weekend in April where it was during most of my life.  Now it’s the second weekend in March, which seems a bit crazy.  Do we really need sunlight in the evening at 7:30 before St. Patrick’s Day?

If you’re one of the many unsung heroes like me who work the overnight shift, Daylight Savings Time takes on a whole different interpretation than what you normally hear about in those incessant reminders that appear on the news.  I didn’t lose an hour of sleep last night, I lost an hour of work…. I won’t get paid for that lost hour, but I’ll take the tradeoff.  It doesn’t really matter to me whether the sun sets at 6:00, 7:00 or 8:00… I’m usually still asleep at that time anyway.

Wake us when the stars come out.

The whole purpose of Daylight Savings Time is in the phrase itself…. to save the daylight hours for when most normal people are usually awake.  Without DST, the sun would rise around 4:00 AM in the summer and set just after 7:00 in the evening.  Those are farmer’s hours, and since I learned from John Cougar Mellencamp songs that all the farmers in America have gone out of business, it clearly makes a lot of sense to move the time up an hour.  If they really want to save on the electric people have to use to light their homes in the evening, they should have a secondary DST period between Memorial Day and Labor Day and set the clocks ahead another hour.  You’ll no longer have to move to Alaska to experience 10:00 daylight!

Well, there is a secondary purpose to Daylight Savings Time as well…. to give everyone from the weatherman to the fire marshal, to your mother two opportunities a year to remind you to check the batteries in your smoke detector….

Check!