I have come to the conclusion that daylight savings is by far the most irritating thing. Its not so much the jumping forward or backward of the hour, it is the devices I own that tell me time that are so painful. And the location of those devices only makes it worse.

My apartment is a one bedroom. So it is basically split in half. The bedroom, and the kitchen/dining/living room. Not bad really, it is a very nice place. (Even when you take its age into account.) But it is split in half and as such, I tend to spend time in one during the day, and the other at night. Broken only by a rare random wondering into the other. So what does this have to do with daylight savings? Simple, the clocks in the bedroom are dumb.

The three major clocks in the kitchen/dining/living room (henceforth, main room) are the callerID box, the VCR, and my laptop. (When you spend the amount of time that I do on it, it becomes a very major source of telling time.) They are smart clocks. You see, the callerID gets the current time/date when someone calls. The VCR updates itself somehow, either getting a signal from somewhere or a built in clock. And the laptop of course calculates and tracks the date and time, being a computer and all.

Now in the other room, the alarm clock, and the radio clock, are dumb clocks. Dumb as in you have to set the time. So twice a year, I run into this very, very irritating problem. One room is an hour ahead or behind the other. It wouldn't be so irritating if I would figure it out right away. Unfortunately most of the time it takes me a couple of days. (Someone alerted me to this fall's change. If not, it probably would have been November sometime before I noticed.)

The fact that it usually takes me a while means that I get this disjunct "jump" moving around the apartment. For example, I'll decide that at four pm, I am going to leave to the book store so that I have time before it closes at six pm. I wonder out of the main room, into the bedroom to pull on a clean shirt, grab my belt, and so on. At some point, since I am thinking about the time, I'll look at the clock. It says five pm. It does not register that I just jumped an hour. What registers is that if I want to be there before it closes, I need to haul ass. At which point I get there with much time to spare. (Nice to have such a ready example, since I did this exact thing today.) Most irritating is that I will usually do this for a couple of days before I notice.

This bring the conclusion that if all my clocks adjusted them selves for daylight savings, I would probably never notice it. Which wouldn't be all that bad. It wouldn't be such a pain in the brain then. I could happily continue to mostly ignore time as I normally do. (My life is such currently that there are perhaps two meetings a week that have set times. Everything else is when it happens. As such, knowing what time it is really isn't all that important.)

In the mean time, daylight savings is evil.