Don’t forget to Spring Forward tomorrow morning at 2 am (Sunday, March 13). We are going on Daylight Saving Time. Whoopee!

I really detest DST. It means I have to get up when I’m sleepy and go to bed when I’m not. It means eating breakfast, lunch and supper before I’m hungry. Well, that might make me eat less, so I guess that part is good. It means daylight pouring through our family room window onto the television news. It will be dark at the start of the day, and the extra hour in the afternoon will be — an extra hour in the afternoon.

DST was invented by the Germans in World War I to get the drop on the Allies. It worked until England went on it. When the United States got involved, we adopted it as a patriotic gesture; you know, to give up something for the Yanks, as if it were Lent.

It was supposed to save on the use of electricity, and give more time to grow food and make the war materiel needed over there, over there. Three cheers.

People used more electricity in the dark morning than they saved by turning on the lights an hour later. The farmers hated the idea: the chickens didn’t get up an hour earlier. And when you are producing stuff twenty four hours a day there is no savings there.
Here we sit at the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, so we already have extra sunlight. It turns out that the only people in a time zone who are “on time” are those in the middle of it. Those to the east of it are shorted by a half hour and those to the west gain a half hour.

There was an article in the morning paper about DST affecting those with sleep disorders. The remedy? Get up a half an hour “earlier” on Sunday and again on Monday and get lots of sunlight. Have you seen much sunlight in Mt. Pleasant this weekend?

My wife and daughter have no problem adjusting to DST. Their internal clock must be digital. My internal time piece is a grandfather clock, with the pendulum swinging between my socks. I have to agree with Ebenezer Scrooge on this one: Bah! Humbug!