Try and Figure Out What Time It Is

I’m fixing to try and figure out what time it is.

The idea of daylight saving time (DST) is to get better use of the daylight. It has been used for the past 100 years, but the idea was conceived many years before that.

The idea of DST was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 during his stay in Paris, when he published an essay titled “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” that proposed to economize the use of candles by rising earlier to make use of the morning sunlight.

However, the invention of DST has mainly been credited to William Willett in 1905 after he came up with the idea of moving the clocks forward by 20 minutes for four Sundays in a row in the Spring, and vice versa in the fall, but thank goodness the idea never caught on until 1916 during WW I. After the war it went away, but returned during WW II in 1942, and instead of being called DST, it was called “War Time.”

From 1945 to 1966 the War Time caused massive confusion for trains, buses and industry. Since that time the policy has changed several times, but was last revised in 2005 and went into effect in 2007, whereas the current policy is that DST starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November, and is observed in over 70 countries worldwide.

However, most of Arizona, the Virgin Islands and Guam do not, and they seem to get along fine.

The main confusion with DST is determining whether to set your clock backwards or forward by an hour. I always heard it said that a good way to remember was by remembering to “Spring back and to Fall forward.” But sometimes I get it confused and spring forward and fall backwards, and it usually gets me into trouble.

As confusing as DST time is, imagine traveling from the Eastern Time Zone to the Central Time Zone, and back again, on the Saturday and Sunday when it kicks in.

When I departed the Eastern Time Zone and entered the Central Time Zone I knew it was an hour earlier than it had been a moment ago when I had crossed that imaginary line, but it got a little more complicated when I factored in the fact that daylight savings time was going into effect and that the time would either go back another hour, or it would go forward an hour, resulting in it being the same time as it had been prior to my departure from the former time zone.

When it came time to depart the Central Time Zone and return to the Eastern Time Zone, to be honest with you, I had no idea what time it was. I didn’t know if it was time to eat or time to sleep, or if it was time to go, or if I could linger a little longer.

I debated with myself whether I should set my watch forward for one hour or two hours, or if I should set it back one or two, or if maybe it already had the correct time since I had gained an hour then lost an hour at the same time as DST had given me back an hour, or maybe taken away an hour.

I’m fixing to get myself a sun dial.