Lost time is a sign of alien abduction

Oh bloody hell. I get up this morning, chipper and everything, ready to do some long overdue housecleaning because my mom is going to be in town tomorrow. You tend to let things go when you're a bachelor, I'm afraid. Anyway, I get up, and somebody has stolen an hour from me. I think it's the government. Damn government.

Alright, I know all the practical explanations and the possibly impractical ones. I've seen or heard the headlines saying that recent studies show Daylight Savings Time may not actually save any energy at all. I didn't read the stories, so don't go and take the previous statement as any kind of mongering--I don't really know if Daylight Savings accomplishes anything or not and it's really not something I spend a whole lot of time thinking about. It's not like I'm running around madly researching this so I can become a self-anointed expert on the intricacies of American fuel consumption as it relates to daylight hours. Sorry if I sound like an ignorant douche, but there it is.

What does get me, every single year, is the way Daylight Savings sneaks into my home every year, robs me, and I don't even know it until I get a note on my computer. Yes folks, that's the only way Eric would ever know that Daylight Savings time has run in or out of the house, when he gets up in the morning and discovers that his computer has changed time. Or, in today's case, when his cell phone tells him, which counts (it's basically a PDA with phone capabilities, so, you know, it's another computer in the household).

There was one year, back when I was an undergraduate, that I woke up one Monday morning with a paper due in two hours and I was only half-finished. Plenty of time for a smart slacker like me to go down the hill to the computer lab on campus and finish the thing. I go down the hill (this was at Appalachian State University, in Boone, NC; everything is up or down a hill), go to the lab which is already surprisingly full, find a computer, taptaptap out the rest of the paper with plenty of time to spare and look up at the clock to see how much time I have for doing my references, proofing, revision, printing, and getting to class.

(You know where this is going, right?)

As I was saying, I look up at the clock to see how much time I have to spare--

Five minutes.

Bear in mind, please, that this was in the early '90s when the fastest printer out there was still a dot matrix machine that sounded like it was slicing holes in spacetime and produced greyed-out, pixelated text on pages that you had to assemble yourself by tearing on the dotted lines. There were laser printers out there, as I recall, behemoths that took eons to create pages. I can't remember what the computer lab had, not that it matters. I was boned.

Not that that matters. I turned the paper in late, and I don't remember what grade I got, and it was some fourteen-or-so years ago (I graduated from AppState in '94), and the college police still haven't caught up with me to inform me that I never really graduated and therefore my entire subsequent academic and professional career is being formally revoked until I come back and take the exam I missed or turn in a paper for one of the philosophy and religion classes I took. (It was years after graduating from law school that I finally stopped having that nightmare, which I suspect is a fairly common one in the category of "being unprepared for a major presentation" and "appearing naked in a high school classroom.")

Anyway, the point being--time does this to me every year, dammit. And I'm not sure the extra hour of sleep I'll get next fall makes up for it. And now I have to clean the condo, so please excuse me and have a nice day.