Every autumn my father made us drag his small sailboat all the way from the water to the back of our house to store it for the winter. The process of moving the boat was something we all dreaded for the entire year because it usually took about an hour and involved my father hurting his back and someone stubbing their toes.  One year, my brother Noah suggested that we balance the boat in the hatchback of the car and drive it slowly to the back of the house. This reduced the overall time to 45 minutes but did nothing to prevent bloody toes and slipped disks. 

When I was about 12 I mentioned that the fiberglass boat would probably survive the winter if we simply plopped it on the shore and flipped it on its side.  My father thought of several reasons why this wouldn’t work, most of them having to do with the fact that his uncle had once told him to put it behind the house but eventually he acknowledged that it “might work”.  While we’ll never get back the many hours of our lives we wasted dragging the boat to the house, I owe my father a great debt for teaching me an important lesson about paradigm paralysis, which is the term scientists give to people who refuse to move beyond their accepted notion about how something is supposed to work.

In addition to causing my family to drag 400 pounds of fiberglass for no reason, paradigm paralysis has other useful applications such as making my father believe he is allergic to bees because his mother told him he was 50 years ago and making much of the United States, except for Godforsaken Arizona, wake up in the dark or leave work in the dark for no apparent reason.  

If you ask most scholars about Daylight Savings, they will tell you they are scholars of something that doesn’t pertain to Daylight Savings time, but if you ask a special scholar whose research focuses on Daylight Savings, they will probably not work at a very good school and will tell you that it has something to do with America’s agrarian heritage, or children walking home from school in the dark, or both.

I have been asking people about this phenomenon for years and have never received a satisfactory answer so have arrived at my own answer using empirical scientific evidence.  According to scientists, the earth is really small, even though nobody has ever actually touched or gone near anything that is supposedly bigger without catching fire. The tiny little earth rotates around the sun, which for some reason, I think having to do with the ocean, in an circle which is not actually a circle.  

To make things more confusing, the earth also supposedly turns on an axis, which is an invisible stick that is stuck through the center of the earth on an angle.  This turning motion results in days, which vary in length depending upon where you live.  If you live in Vermont, and you are doing your paper route at, for example, 3:45pm after school in an attempt to earn $40 a month, you will be doing your paper route in the pitch dark, because your days contain approximately 6 hours of sunlight, which you won’t mind because it decreases the chances that any girls will see you doing your paper route.  Some places that are really high or really low on the globe, in addition to having a lot of seals, also have a lot of daylight, but because nobody lives there, paper routes are out of the question.

Even though everyone is well aware that the length of days fluctuates throughout the year and 99% of people think Daylight Savings is stupid, there are a few people who will tell you that it “makes a lot of sense” – these are the same people who laugh hysterically during live performances of “Hamlet.”

Media outlets are always very sure to remind people that the clocks don’t technically “fall back” or “spring forward” until 2am on the day in question.  I recognize that for a small subset of the population known as college students who are excited that a bar will stay open one hour longer, this is a very important detail, but for the rest of the population, including the people who laugh at Shakespeare, it would be fine to simply set one’s clock prior to falling asleep. 

According to several sources, Daylight Savings officially entered American life in 1918 and is one of approximately three things that Benjamin Franklin did not invent.  If you spent years reading the nonsense that’s available on this topic you might convince yourself that it’s stood the test of time because it’s an idea with merit.  If you’re like the rest of us, you know it’s just that nobody has suggested flipping it on its side.