Adam Oster, Novelist

With my luck, it just so happened that the weekend we opened the bakery coincided with the time of year in which we skip an entire hour of the weekend, meaning that I was already exhausted from just running everywhere in order to make sure the bakery was running as it needed (including fulfilling my lifelong dream of being an unpaid dishwasher at the age of 40), and then I lost an extra hour of sleep.

So, you can imagine my excitement at the idea that the one time the Senate completely agrees on something, it happens to be regarding the idea of giving up this crazy idea that we should meddle with time.

Actually, to be honest, I don’t care much one way or the other about DST. Sure, it adds some confusion when it comes to things like, you know, how to change all your clocks those two times a year you need to do that. And there’s always the possibility that you’ll be looking at the wrong clock, the one you haven’t changed yet, when getting ready for an event. Or, as my wife found out this weekend (as well as at least one of our staff), if you set your alarm to go off at 2am on the day that we skip right past 2am, your alarm might not go off at all. But the truth is, outside of those crazy times twice a year in which time becomes a bit more questionable than usual, I don’t think much about it.

And, here in Wisconsin, there’s actually some good reason to keep DST around, or at least to keep time an hour behind all year. Because, you see, in winter, our days are incredibly short, and so in those mornings where my kids (some of which have to be at school at 7am) are walking to school, they would be doing it in absolute darkness. And I’m not too keen on that. Sure, we’ve got a pretty well-lit set of streets between our house and the school, but the reality is that it’s just too darn dark for them to be walking.

Of course, they tend to convince me to drive them to school on those early mornings more often than not anyways, but I’d really like to get past that…

So, while I think DST is stupid, because it really screws up at least a couple of days a year and can cause a fair amount of confusion, I’m also thinking that we might be keeping the wrong half of DST.

Also, I’ll deeply miss the majesty that is the extra hour of sleep gained from Falling Back one hour in the fall…