Dear Daughter

Your Life is great because you got an extra hour today plus modern technology made it easier to adjust to the time change. This means you could spend it reading this extra long post. I kid you not, this started off as about 5 sentences and I was done, then somehow I started off on the “Lazy Kids” part and it just got out of control – sorry.

Thanks to NASA scientists employing Einstein’s theory of relativity, the government of the United States has been able to offer each of its citizens an extra hour of life every single year. Unfortunately, they do have to balance out this perplexing time equation by taking back that hour later in the year, but enjoy it while you can.  You are fortunate enough to be living in a state that participates in daylight savings time. There are many less fortunate people out there that woke up this morning and today’s 7 AM looked no different than yesterday’s 7 AM – how sad!

You lazy kids are darn lucky because when I woke up this morning all my clocks were magically reset. My computer, my iPhone, my iPad, and even my office wall clock and the clock on my nightstand all automatically self adjusted for daylight savings time.  For us old people, this actually creates a little confusion because I honestly didn’t know  what time it really was when I got out of bed? Thank goodness, we do have one old  fashion analog clock at home to verify that everything else had self adjusted. Don’t even get me going how in the old days we had to run around the house and start adjusting all the clocks, because nothing adjusted itself. Then there was always the problem if two adults are running around the house adjusting the clocks without telling each other, then you wind up with clocks being adjusted by several hours instead of just a single hour. When this happened then you had to walk over to the phone (no, you did not just pull a phone out of your pocket), and you dialed “popcorn.” That’s right – popcorn! You see the phone just had numbers and letters on it and you could not just pull up your contact list – that was called a phone book.

Anyway, popcorn would tell you the right time so you could adjust the clocks again after having an intense family meeting regarding whom would adjust which clocks in the house so that the same mistake was not repeated again. This process would consume most of the day because often mistakes were made again. In the end, it was best to send everyone outside of the house and lock the doors; this was particularly hard on cold rainy days, but it had to be done. Time had to be correctly adjusted. This process of banishing the remainder of the residents from the house, left just one designated family member (often referred to the time keeper) inside to adjust the clocks alone. That’s the reason they do it on Sunday, because  there’s no way most families could make it to work on a day lights saving adjustment day.

Then just when you thought it was over, you’d get in the car and realize the car radio or dashboard clock also needed to be adjusted. You’d get that done and exhale a sigh of relief thinking that the whole ordeal is thankfully over. But no, the adjustment period actually could go on for weeks. Often the next time you wanted to wear a different wrist watch, you’d open up the drawer to get it and dang it that also needed to be adjusted. This problem was actually exacerbated by early technology. you see, the early analog wristwatches just had a little knob you can turn to adjust the time – easy and simple! Then some nerd thought that it would be cool to create digital watches. However, the digital watches had all kinds of odd little buttons and combinations of pushing buttons in order to adjust the date and time and there was no such thing as daylight savings time self adjustment programmed into these hideous little machines. At the time there was also no Internet, so if you lost the instructions written in microscopic print telling you how to adjust the time on your wristwatch, you basically just left it in the drawer for the next six months waiting for time change back so that your watch actually told the right time  once more.

See how lucky you are? Hopefully this means that you got an extra hour of much needed sleep and are waking up this morning a little bit better rested to quite literally what should be a brighter day without  having to spend hours adjusting clocks.

Dad