On Sunday, Nov. 3 at 2 a.m., Americans stop saving daylight.
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill that ordered Americans to save daylight every year, but nobody seems to know where all the daylight hundreds of millions of Americans have saved since 1966 has gone.
Officially, since 2007, the second Sunday in March is the date that most Americans start saving daylight and the first Sunday in November is the date Americans stop saving daylight and go back to standard time when, evidently, nobody in the country saves any daylight at all. Arizona and Hawaii don’t recognize Daylight Saving Time and neither spring forward or fall back.
Daylight Saving Time has been around over 50 years and nobody seems to know exactly what it is supposed to do. What it does is cause people to get off their normal schedule, walk around sleepy and often irritable for a week or so.
One idea on why the federal government decided that it would be good for the nation to turn their clocks forward an hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall is that it would save electricity because people would use their lights less.
Since electricity today is used for so many functions other than lights, if that were the reason then, if it ever worked, it certainly couldn’t be working in 2019.
At least with phones and computers updating themselves, it’s no longer the case that people spend a week or two wondering what time it is.
“Honey, did you reset the clock in the kitchen or am I going to be an hour late for work?” is not something that should be heard in most households these days, but it does seem that if the government is going to inconvenience everyone twice a year, some official should come forth and explain exactly what Daylight Saving Time is supposed to do. And while they are at it, they could explain where all that daylight Americans have saved is being stored.
