I slept through the Daylight Savings change last week. More accurately, I didn’t realize it was occurring – I thought it was yesterday, not the Sunday a week ago – and I generally sleep late on the weekends anyway, so I got an extra hour of sleep without realizing, until yesterday, that I had done so. The reason that I was able to go a week without realizing that this had happened – that I had slept through the change and that the change had occurred – is that almost every clock I deal with is self-adjusting and simply changed with the official time. The clocks in my home and office computers, and my phone, which are the ones I consult far more often than any others, all automatically adjust for Daylight Savings (and, for that matter, for time-zone changes when I travel). The only clocks I see every day that require manual adjustment are the two in our kitchen at home, one on the stove and one on the microwave, and we never change them. They’re set at hour apart, so one of them is always right, but which one changes with the season.
When I was a kid, Daylight Savings meant manually changing four mechanical watches in the house, the electric clock in the kitchen, and three clock-radios. Obviously, we’re better off with clocks that use the internet to automatically adjust themselves to the correct time. Saying that you’d rather change clocks yourself than have them do so automatically is one of the weirder, if less important, forms of Luddism. On the other hand, I doubt that the people who designed automatic adjustment into internet-connected clocks intended to make Daylight Savings invisible. It has real effects – as anyone with an infant on a regular feeding schedule knows – and accidentally hiding it is not great.
Photo by Adrien Robert on Unsplash
