Daylight Savings Time

30 October 2000

It's October 30 as I write this, which means that we've once again just put ourselves through the process by which we get jet lag without actually going anywhere.

You say that a single hour doesn't make a difference? You're deluding yourself, friend.

It's actually not so bad in the fall; we gain an hour. It's like flying west. I love flying from Europe to North America, where you leave at noon and arrive at 3:30 p.m., having a seven-hour afternoon. (I like flying from the east coast of the U.S. to the west coast less because I'm not all that fond of the west coast.)

In the spring, though, it's murder. I think that I might have delayed sleep phase syndrome. I gather that the problem is that people with DSPS (as I suspect I am) have internal 'clocks' that take 27 or 28 or 29 hours to complete a single cycle. This obviously leaves them out of sync with the sun, and, by extension, most of the other people in the world. I have no problems flying from Europe to even the central time zone; I get up at a normal time in Europe (actually usually very early to get to the airport), and go to bed at a normal time (10 or 11 pm or so) in, say, Chicago. Adding five hours to my day isn't a problem.

In the other direction, though, I'm a mess. It takes me at least a day to recover from flying east. Even if I sleep on the plane. Flying to Europe means having a 'day' that's only 18 or 19 hours long. Since my body thinks a day should be about 27 hours long, that's a problem.

I have tried a lot of things to correct this: sleeping on planes, drugs, etc., etc., so I know whereof I speak. Please don't send me e-mail with your surefire jet-lag remedy, unless you identify with the rest of this story and have actually found something that works for you.

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, ranting about daylight savings time. Actually, I was gearing up to tell the story about how I missed three days of classes once in college because of daylight savings time. This is a true story.

It was the spring, so the clocks had been set forward an hour; i.e. at 1:59:59 am it magically became 3 am.

I was asleep at that point, and had not reset my clocks. For whatever reason, I didn't reset my clocks in the morning, either. I had forgotten about daylight savings time.

On Monday, I got up at what I thought was 9 am for a 10 am class. When I got there, of course, everyone else thought it was 11 am, and everyone was coming out of the classroom.

At the time, I wore a relatively unreliable watch, so I chalked it up to not paying enough attention and wasting time at home and reset the watch (to 11 am) from the university's clocks.

That semester, I had lucked out and had only that single class on Mondays. I went on home.

I did the things I normally did, and generally frittered away the rest of the day. In the evening, I noticed that my watch did not agree with the other clocks in the house -- not an unusual occurrence, as I've pointed out -- and -- here it comes -- reset the watch to standard time. All my clocks and such now read, say, 7 pm while the rest of the time zone thought it was 8 pm.

Tuesday morning, I got up and went to class. This time, when I showed up, everyone was already there. I assumed that I was a little late, went in, and sat down.

Those of you familiar with American class schedules might already have picked up on what was going on here.

Most American universities stagger classes, lectures, etc., with "A" meeting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for an hour each day, and "B" meeting on Tuesday and Thursday for an hour and thirty minutes. (I don't know if the same is true anywhere else, but it might be.) The point being that both class "A" and class "B" meet the same number of hours each week, and that you never have the same class two days in a row.

Of course, I thought I was five minutes late for the class. I was actually thirty minutes late.

Dunderhead that I am, I didn't notice the clock in the room, and, while the class seemed abnormally short to me, I didn't particularly pick up on the fact that it had only been 1/3 the length I had been expecting.

The next class I had followed immediately, so I got to that one on time by the simple expedient of walking from one to the other.

When I got home, I finally figured out what was going on. I went through the apartment and reset all my clocks to daylight time.

That night at some point, the power failed, at least momentarily.

The next morning, I woke to find my alarm clock flashing "12:00".

The only non-electronic timekeeping device in the house was my watch.

Which I had neglected to set forward when I did the rest of the clocks (I had taken it off).

Further, I had forgotten that I had not set it to daylight time.

So: I hum merrily through the apartment, setting all the clocks back to standard time. Keep in mind that it is now Wednesday.

I'd overslept through my first class (Constitutional Law, which I got an "A" in anyway), even by standard time, so I wrote that off.

That afternoon, I went to this seminar I had that, strangely, met for and hour and a half on Wednesdays and Fridays. This was a much smaller group, so the instructor (Rockwell Gray, as it happens, the brother of the much better-known Spalding Gray) asked me why the hell I was showing up thirty minutes late.

I looked up at the clock and figured out, in a flash, what had happened. I explained the whole story, spinning out most of the tale you've just read. Rocky looked at me with no small measure of suspicion. I gathered that he did not believe a word of it was true.

It was a creative-writing seminar, though, so I'm not sure whether this counted against me.

In any case, this is just another reason why daylight savings time is evil.