So I woke up this morning feeling better rested than I expected, started on my morning routine, and eventually noticed that my microwave’s clock was an hour fast.

Oh, yeah, I thought. That shit.

That’s about it for the good parts of Daylight Saving Time. Well, that and the fact that phones have replaced alarm clocks for a lot of people, so at least some of us don’t have to plan ahead for it.

It wasn’t quite out of the 30s yet, with a northerly wind, as I headed out. Even if the wind dies down by then, it’ll still be uncomfortably chilly when the sun goes down shortly after 4. A perfect match.

 

Spring’s DST day is no fun either, especially for someone who works most weekends, because the government demands that hour of sleep back.

 

As I recall, this all started in the US as an energy-saving measure back when incandescent light bulbs were still a novelty; it makes less sense (read: no sense that I can see) in the present day, especially in frozen latitudes like the one I live in, where summer days can be around 15 hours (so no need to conserve that daylight) and winter days are something like 9 hours (good luck trying to maximize utility for a varied populace).

Like a lot of things, it doesn’t sound like a big deal when described in isolation. But it doesn’t happen in isolation. Every other species of annoyance still afflicts us, as usual, and twice a year we have this to deal with. And the only reason it hasn’t been abolished yet is that our ruling class and its tame wonks can’t agree on whether to have standard time or daylight time year round.