Daylight Savings Time: Time To Wind That Clock, If You Still Have One

What time is it?

This is one of the most confusing days of the year for me, the hours leading up to Daylight Savings Time.

The day when, at 2 a.m. March 10, it becomes 3 a.m. You know, spring ahead an hour.

I wake up Sunday and stare at the things in life that tell you the time, and wonder: Is that right?

Because these days, so many of the clocks revert for us. In fewer and fewer cases you personally don't have to "wind your clock." My smart phone updates itself. My television updates itself. My pocket watch, not so much.

It's nice that these robots from the Jetsons Era do that for us, it's quite considerate, and I do thank them, but it makes all my other time-bearing appliances seem lazy in comparison, and it also serves to truly confuse me. As I walk through the house, and smartphone and television have one time, and microwave, oven and wall clock have another time an hour apart, I do more than wonder what Daylight Savings Time is saving us from, really. 

Besides that mess, it's also the time of year where I spend the most time wondering about all the other things impacted by this lost hour. What happens to television programs that regularly air at 2:30 a.m. Sundays, for example. 

I'm sure the more diligent of you out there, dear readers, wake up and set upon the task of changing all the times on your clocks Sunday morning or, for the more organized, perhaps before bed Saturday night. Some of you — I have been known to do this — may even stay up until 2 a.m. and wait to be thrust forward an hour into the future, to not sleep through this small window of quasi time travel.

So at whatever point you start this annual chore, at least tomorrow it is easier than the "fall back" time of year. Once you figure out what button (or what many many buttons) you have to push to get into your gadget's clock settings, all you have to do is hit it once to change the hour. Unless your settings have a minus button you have a lot more button mashing to do in the fall to get to 1 a.m. from 2 a.m.

Invariably, I miss a clock. I'll discover, maybe around 11 a.m. (or is it noon?), that the DVD player doesn't match the television. The time on the iPod dock doesn't match the time on the iPhone I just stuck in it. 

I'll admit the one clock that manages to escape this chore is the clock in my car. I will always forget it is there, and, as I head out for some errand, look down and think to myself, "that is not right." But you can't really change the time as you drive down the highway, nor did car manufacturers have simplicity in mind when creating the process of setting your car radio's clock. 

Unfortunately, due to my inability to reset my car radio's clock with any sort of grace, I instead manage to hit the combination of buttons for resetting my programmed radio stations, and leave myself with a bunch of unintended new music choices or static. 

And I'll still have the time wrong after that, so at that point I just give up and convince myself I can make it to fall being an hour off all summer. So just to recap: most of the year I drive around in a jalopy with the wrong time and awful preset radio stations.

Whether you spend Sunday morning pondering the nature of the space-time continuum, bungling the clock instructions on your 2004 Toshiba, or are content to do nothing and add an hour in your head, just please remember to spend a portion of the day also changing the batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

Those things, I am certain, do not change themselves.