Time Isn't on My Side

It’s really disconcerting to have no sense of time. I woke up yesterday morning and found that my computer clock and my clock radio displayed times with an hour difference. At first I attributed the discrepancy to my computer being a freak. Lately, each time I restart it, until I reset the settings, it thinks it’s 1969 –- I’m not expert, but I’m pretty sure personal computers didn’t even exist at that point! Why, then, I wondered, is it only off by an hour this time? Then it occurred to me – Daylight Saving Time! We always fall back the weekend before Halloween. As a kid who took my candy gathering seriously, I knew that that extra hour of darkness would come just in time to provide additional trick-or-treating opportunities. I mentally thanked my computer for reminding me about the time switch; I couldn’t believe I had slept through my extra hour!

I went about resetting some clocks to adjust for the time and lived my life accordingly. My busy schedule consisted of lounging until getting brunch at 3:30 – give or take an hour. Later at night, someone asked the time and I provided a different answer than another housemate. I vouched for the earlier time, citing Daylight Saving Time, but was shut down. “We’d have heard if that was this weekend,” a housemate said. “Who would tell us” I asked. We don’t watch much TV, don’t get a newspaper, and don’t have contact with too many people who are on top of this sort of thing, so it’s not necessarily information that would be conveyed to us. So then I convince people it’s an hour earlier and everyone rejoices. Being handed an additional hour is an immeasurably amazing gift.

I decided to procrastinate on finishing my grading for the following day with my extra hour by playing Scrabble with Anna. Within ten minutes, however, someone discovered that the time had in fact not changed when it was discovered that our cellular phones uniformly weren’t synching up with the new time. Though it had only been ten minutes, the time we wasted while thinking we could waste time made everyone fly into a panic. “There’s so much that needs to be done!” “I have work to do!” Consequently, I felt so guilty for not doing work, I could barely enjoy my game of Scrabble. Sure, I still finished the game. And sure, I still played another one immediately after that. But you wouldn't believe how stressful that all was.