Rumor has it that it takes two to tango, three to make a crowd and a village to raise a child. I am convinced it takes just one bureaucrat to ruin a perfectly wonderful idea.
Take, for example, Daylight Saving Time. It’s not a bad idea; it’s a good idea poorly implemented.
We probably owe our changing clocks to that venerable old fellow Ben Franklin. The idea of changing the clocks to take advantage of the changes in sunrise and sunset appealed to his frugal nature — that is, the more natural light you have available, the fewer candles you will burn. Of course, dear Ben suggested that church bells — and, as necessary, cannon fire — be used to inform the citizenry of sunrise. He posited that if you “oblige a man to rise at four in the morning … it is more than probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening.”
He obviously never met undergrads.
Saving daylight hours and the corresponding resources is a perfectly reasonable idea, particularly when it means that every year each and every one of us gets issued an extra hour for our very own. The problem is that some narrow-minded bureaucrat decided that it would be better for all of us if we took our extra hour at the same time and on the same night. Then they made it worse by placing our extra hour in the wee small hours of the night.
After pondering, I came up with just three things I could do with an extra hour between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.: sleep, have sex, or watch two extra episodes of Mister Ed on late-night television. It’s not that these are particularly bad choices, it’s just that there would be so much more scope for the imagination if we structured this time business differently.
Imagine, for example, having an extra hour at lunchtime. Wouldn’t that be a nice place to start? Instead of bed or television, you would now have a wealth of options: food, errands, manicures, oil changes, the gym, et cetera. All the places that are stubbornly closed for business at 2 a.m. would now be open and available for you to patronize during your extra hour. We might even be able to stimulate a flagging economy this way!
If not lunchtime, how about an extra hour in the evening? Families could have more quality time, and I’d love to be able to come home after a long day of school and finally be able to watch a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer without thinking that I should really be doing my reading for the next day. In this case, an extra hour in the evening wouldn’t really change my habits, but it would relieve a lot of guilt.
By far my favorite idea is to have each of us issued our very own extra hour to use when we like, how we like. Those of us with punctuality problems could take it in 12 five-minute increments. Finally, we’d know what it feels like to arrive on time. Perpetual procrastinators could save theirs to take right before a major term paper is due. Of course, those rare souls without time management problems might feel at a disadvantage, but I propose we allow them to save their hours up. After just two and a half decades, they could have an entire extra day!
I see just two problems with this more flexible approach. First, we’d have to create the GTAO — General Time Accounting Office — to keep track of everyone’s hours. After all, there would be some unethical folks out there who would try to take more than their allotted hour. And given our free market society, I can easily see a day where people trade their extra hour for economic gain. So, the GTAO would probably require us to fill out time forms to document when, where, and how we spent our time. Rules would be implemented to govern the hows and whys of our extra time to keep people from investing in time shelters. Eventually, the Time Code would rival the Tax Code and we’d spend three hours trying to document how we spent our extra hour.
The second problem is spring. You see, while we are issued an extra hour in October, it’s more of a loan than a gift and, come April, we’re supposed to give it back. That would seem to be a formidable problem. The solution, however, is simple: deficit spending. The current administration has convinced me that deficit spending is the only way to go. Balanced budgets are the hobgoblin of little minds and Democrats.
So, between now and next October, I urge you all to consider when, where and how our extra hours should be spent. Me? I’m going to go nap. I was up late watching Mister Ed.