Daylight Savings Time

​Daylight Savings Time is such a scam. One night you go to bed and then thanks to some government bureaucrats, you wake up the next day in a different time zone. You’re not allowed to just do that to time. Who the hell do you think you are, you can just take an hour here and put it a few months over there? No, and every year it gets worse, it used to be that you’d have to manually set your clocks to the new hijacked time, but with computers, with the Internet, it’s like it’s all happening behind my back.

​I’ll never forget the first time I saw the higher-ups rob an hour from me, right in front of my face. I was watching TV, it was like one-thirty in the morning, there was nothing on but, I don’t know, I couldn’t get to sleep, so I was watching reruns of all of those really bad Comedy Central shows. I’m looking at the time, thinking to myself, man, only one more minute until Mind of Mencia is over. I really hope the next show isn’t so ridiculously unfunny.

​And that’s when it happened. It went from 1:59, to 3:00, just like that. I took out my phone. Three in the morning. Are you kidding me? “Where is my hour?” I started screaming out loud to nobody in particular, “Where is my time going?”

​Because, that’s traumatic. At least if you’re going to change the official time, just keep it to yourself. Fine, the banks and post offices are going start opening a little earlier, and yeah, the restaurants and movie theaters will probably have no choice but to follow suit. But what about me? Don’t I have a say in the matter? If I don’t feel like changing my watch, I’m not going to.

​I don’t like this idea that you fall asleep and you wake up and it’s like, you don’t even need to be a part of the equation. “Don’t worry Rob,” whoever’s in charge of this is whispering in my ear, “You don’t have to worry about Daylight Savings Time at all this year. Just go to sleep, and when you wake up, everything will be adjusted for you. What’s that? You feel a little tired? You’re a little late for work? Well that’s not our problem. Just because you can’t get to work on time doesn’t mean that it’s the clock’s fault.”

​But it is the clock’s fault. I remember one year, maybe it was the year after the cable box incident, I went to bed thinking, OK, I’ve got to make sure to consider Daylight Savings Time when I’m setting my alarm. I thought, I’ll just set the time for an hour earlier. And then it changed by itself, and my alarm time was the wrong time, even though it should’ve been the right time. And I was trying to tell my boss, I was like, no, just listen, please, I know this is two weeks in a row, but this is seriously an excuse here, I’m not kidding, just please listen to this one sentence, this one really long detailed sentence, because it’s not my fault.

​I’m scared as to where this is all headed. It’s like, what’s to say I’m not going to go to sleep one night only to wake up and it’ll be months from now? Like, what the hell? Why is so cold out? How come it’s snowing? And I’ll look on the Internet and it’ll just say, “Relax Rob, everything’s fine, do to Global Warming Adjustment Time, we’re going to go ahead and say that today is February 9th. And yes, unfortunately that means that, since we skipped most of last year, you technically never filed your taxes. And so we had to audit you. And do you care to explain yourself here Rob, why haven’t you been paying taxes for the past several months? Can you explain these numbers?”

​And what am I going to say? I’ll be shivering, it’s February now and I’m still wearing my summer pajamas, and when did the Internet get so smart? Why is it asking me about my taxes? Isn’t there an option to turn the clock back a little? But not the actual clock, I’m talking like the technological clock, like Windows 95, I remember you’d wake up after DST and there’d be a little window, “Do you want to change the clock?” or something like that, and that would be great, OK, fine, at least it’s giving me the option. What if I want to keep that hour, can’t I just pretend it’s still eight o’clock, even if just for the weekend? Come on, don’t tell me it’s Wednesday already.