You know what frosts my flakes?
Daylight saving time.
Twice every year, this country participates in a giant national clock prank and somehow we all pretend it makes perfect sense.
Every spring, we stumble around like sleep-deprived zombies because somebody decided we should all start our chaotic lives an hour earlier.
Then every fall, we celebrate getting one extra hour of sleep like we just won the lottery.
Congratulations, America. Your grand prize for surviving six months of continuous exhaustion is saving one lousy hour of time.
Meanwhile, every microwave, security system, oven, car clock and wall clock in the house starts blinking like a distress signal from a stranded submarine. Even old grandfather clocks need to be manually adjusted all over the country.
And for what?
Cows do not care, farmers do not care and kids still hate getting up for school. Grandpa Grumpy still wakes up at 7 a.m. whether the clock says 6, 7 or “ERROR.”
But, now you have to double-check every appointment on your calendar just to make sure it moved the right direction.
This ridiculous tradition has been hanging around since black-and-white television and rotary phones.
Like the old proverb says, only an idiot thinks cutting six inches off one end of a blanket and sewing it onto the other end makes the blanket longer.
Scientists have already said we’d be better off picking one time and sticking with it year-round.
We would get more sunrises before 7 a.m. and more sunsets after 5 p.m. There would be less confusion and less sleep disruption. There would be fewer people wandering into the kitchen wondering why their body feels like it got hit by a dump truck.
Even pets know something is wrong. Dogs start demanding dinner at weird hours like tiny furry union bosses.
Somehow, Congress keeps “debating” this issue every single year like they are solving world peace.
How hard can this possibly be? Just pick a time, leave it alone and move on with your lives.
But, nooooo.
Every year politicians emerge from their burrows, hold hearings, make speeches and still accomplish absolutely nothing.
I think the real reason they keep daylight saving time around is because changing the clocks twice a year is the only thing that unites Americans in common hatred besides politicians themselves.
Arizona has so much daylight we do not even bother changing the clocks. But, we still get dragged into the same nonsense because we technically switch to Pacific time simply by staying where we are.
I’m Grandpa Grumpy and if the government wants to save daylight so badly, put it in a mason jar and leave my clocks alone.