Fooling with the clock

Here we go again! Congress, with their usual bumbling idiocy, declared that Daylight Savings Time would begin on March 8 this year, "to add more hours of daylight to conserve energy." How's that again?

Is it simply a coincidence that DST, April Fool's Day, and the IRS tax deadline all fall in the spring of the year? Or is there a connection in there someplace?

The practice of fooling around on April 1 began under King Charles IX in 1564. Throughout France in the early sixteenth century, New Year's Day was celebrated on March 25, the advent of spring. The weeklong festivities ended with dinners and parties on April 1. When King Charles adopted the Gregorian calendar, New Year's Day was moved back to January 1, much to the chagrin of the party-loving French. When the Frenchmen continued partying and exchanging gifts on April 1, political jokers (yes, they had them even in the 16th Century!) ridiculed the conservatives' steadfast attachment to the old New Year's date by sending prank gifts and invitations to nonexistent parties.

They enjoyed the April pranks so much, the French made April Fool's Day a custom in its own right, no longer protesting the calendar change that had given it birth. The jesting and fooling took about 200 years to reach merry old England, where it also took root, and then traveled to the New World with early settlers.

The custom quickly caught on here in America, and nowhere is it practiced more tenaciously than in the hallowed halls of Congress. Like King Charles of old, who fooled around with the calendar, our erstwhile congressmen decided to tinker with the clock. The dates for DST has bounced around from Congress to Congress, and in 2007 they fooled around again with God's time keeping, making it even longer. So every year they spend millions of tax money, confuse  all the computers, Blackberries, cell phones, and foul up our entire transportation system. How does shaving an hour off the morning and sticking it on the evening save us anything? I think they use the same rationale for that as they do balancing the budget.

One of the dictionary definitions of a fool is "one who lacks judgment." In that context, I wonder if those fools in Congress ever had to put up with a baby who is preset to go off at a certain time, without regard to the Uniform Time Act? Try telling an infant that because it's Daylight Saving Time, he can't wake up yet. 

And when they started fooling around with the clock, did they even give one iota of consideration to those of us without engineering degrees who have to reset umpteen dozen quartz and windup clocks, digital watches, and car clocks? Not to mention resetting and rescheduling the remote controls on our televisions, VCR's, and the time clock on our computers. If you factor in all the time it takes to reset everything twice a year, you'll soon figure out Congress hasn't saved us any time at all....we've gone in the hole, timely speaking.

An old proverb says, "Who loses an hour loses life; you may as well borrow a person's money as his time." When Congress decided to fool around with our time, they took that adage to heart. The figured since they already have most our money, they might as well "borrow" our time as well!

The only clock in our house that doesn't get changed is my hourglass figure, and that's because all the sand has already drifted to the bottom! Now if Congress could figure out a way to work on that, they might have something.