Well another Daylight Savings Time season has come and gone this past weekend, and hopefully most of us have adjusted our grandfather clocks, wall clocks, mantel clocks, wristwatches, microwave ovens and DVR and VCRs and Cable boxes etc. The list goes on and on. This year, apparently, iPhone users who had not been keeping up with the news that there was a bug this year with the iPhone’s alarm clock software may have been an hour late today, or was it an hour early. Anyway …..
In case anyone has missed it, this past Saturday night to Sunday morning, for those geographical areas that observe Daylight Savings Time, clocks were moved back one hour as we transitioned to Standard Time. We got, for those who chose to make use of the extra time that way, one more of hour sleep, or at least one more hour to our day. And Sunday and Monday night, to no great surprise, daylight ended sooner and nighttime descended upon us an hour earlier.
In the Spring, we move and moved clocks forward one hour, and the in the Fall, we turn clocks back an hour. Officially, the time change takes place at 2am Daylight Saving Time, with clocks going back one hour to 1am Standard Time..
Every so often, Congress has changed the timing for when Daylight Savings time starts and when Standard Time begins. The original idea behind Daylight Savings Time was both to increase energy efficiency and increase school safety for children going outdoors in the early morning. The idea of having an extra hour on sunshine during the Summer months was another impetus behind the plan.
Not all States have come on board with Daylight Savings. Hawaii and Arizona are 2 States that are on Standard time all throughout the year. States and countries can and do also come up with their own schedules as to when Standard Time begins and ends.
Our biological clock, or some might say biorhythms, is another matter. While this blogger personally finds the Spring switch to Daylight Savings time and the loss of an hour more difficult to adjust to that Fall’s switch to Standard Time and an hour extra in the day, both wreak some havoc on my body’s internal clock. It’s a feeling somewhat akin to flying to geographic destainations in other time zones and attempting to adjust one’s internal clock.
Also, as a clock store, as you can imagine, we have many antique grandfather clocks, mantle clocks and wall clocks to adjust the time on with the change to Standard Time. Then there are the reporters who are4 always interested in covering a ck store attempting to adjust all of its clocks at midnight, even though that’s not when the time change takes place, nor is there a reason to adjust them all at once. But it makes for good viewership and ratings, and sometimes good publicity for our Stores.
Then there are the Monday and Tuesday phone calls, with everything from basic help requests to how to change time, to those about what to do with their atomic wall clocks that have yet to adjust themselves, to the inevitable few who have broken their clocks when they fell when they were taking them off the wall.
We never close on the Monday after the change in Daylight Savings Time or the change to Standard Time. For some reason, grandfather clocks shoppers seem to come out in full force looking for grandfather clock discounts and sales on wall clocks and mantel clocks. Guess time was on their minds, and they had an extra hour on their hands.