Article by Yashowanto Ghosh, Staff Writer

Image courtesy of imgflip.com and Yashowanto Ghosh

I’m with The Most Interesting Man in the World on this one.  What Daylight Saving Time does every spring is criminal—Virginia Woolf even used an image of violence when she wrote of it in her novel “Mrs. Dalloway.”

We at The Saint, too, have voiced our concerns about DST.  But all that was about spring, when the practice robs us of an hour of weekend sleep; it actually doesn’t look too bad in fall, when it lets us sleep an extra hour.  

Which got me thinking that there may, after all, be a way to make DST our friend not only in fall, but also in spring, and even in winter.  My idea is this:

The reason we hate DST in spring is that we lose an hour of sleep.  But the goal of DST—to start spring and summer days an hour earlier, to have the sun shine an hour longer in the evenings—can be achieved equally well by moving our clocks in the opposite direction.  On Sunday, March 8, 2020, we could adjust our clocks, not one hour forward, but instead 23 hours back.  That too would give us the desired extra hour of sunlight in the evening, and I, for one, can promise to not complain about it.  I am happy to get an extra hour of sleep in fall, and a trite calculation predicts that I’d be about 23 times happier to get 23 extra hours of weekend in spring.

But such an arrangement would make our years 24 hours longer than normal, causing the seasons to shift, which would be a problem too.  In fact, if we keep having those long years for a couple of centuries, then it would be summer in December and winter in May, like New Zealand—in other words, the world would turn upside down.  We can’t have that, of course.

So here’s my answer to that:  Let’s also adjust our clocks 24 hours forward on Monday, February 3, 2020—in general, on the first Monday in February every year.  That way our years would stay the same length, so the seasons would not shift; the time we lose when we move our clocks forward would be a whole day, so it would not mess up our sleep schedules; and the time we lose would be a working day in winter, so absolutely no one would be sorry to see it go.  In fact, it would be a win, Win, WIN—the first, lowercase win for the extra hour of sleep in fall; the second one, with just the first letter capitalized, for the 23 extra hours of weekend in spring; and the final, all-caps one for the missing Monday in the middle of winter.

And then The Most Interesting Man in the World would no longer hate Daylight Saving Time, not even in spring.

    Yashowanto Ghosh is a senior with a major in English with a writing emphasis and a minor in Japanese. Jasho is also an alumnus of Aquinas (B.A. German ’11, B.A. Communication ’17).