Daylight Saving

Daylight Saving returned while we were asleep last night, and it's good that these days our computer through some magical internal procedure recognizes the change. So to check the correct time and reset all the clocks in the house we now look at the clock on the bottom right-hand side of the screen.

In the old days you would pick up the phone, call P.O.P.C.O.R.N. and a woman's voice, pleasant enough though a bit robotic, would say the correct time at ten second intervals: 'At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be nine-thirty-five and fifty seconds.' No more. Either the phone company has decided that this useful resource is no longer needed by the populace at large who care about the correct time, or it has found that there is no pay-out for the cost of tying up their resources in the face of increasing competition.

Adjusting all the clocks in the house is a chore, especially since we have a few older clock radios with digital readouts that can go only forward. So if you make a mistake and go past the time you were trying to set, you have to cycle through another twelve (or sometimes twenty-four) hours in order to get it right. On newer clocks you get buttons that allow backward as well as forward adjustments, and you can also easily toggle between A.M. and P.M.

The older hand-wound clocks and watches made life easier still – you just moved the hour hand a complete cycle forward in the spring, and backward in the fall.

And please, people, it's Daylight Saving, not Savings. (It ain't a bank.)