Daylight Time Savings
Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine
Monday, April 7, 1997 (377)
ISSN 1482-0471
By Leandro
It was a late Saturday night, and I had just gotten home. It wasn't that late, just passed 1 in the morning. I turn on the computer for a quick check at my e-mail, and Windows '95 kindly pops up with a window informing me that daylight time savings had occurred, and why not, it will change my computer's time to 2 AM. Suddenly from "not so late" the situation switched to "late". Considering that I had to get up the next morning at 7 to go to work, the "late" suddenly became an "extremely late" so I quickly checked my mail and went to sleep. Actually, I got a busy signal, waited another 15 minutes, and then finally decided to go to sleep, not after doing a few other things.
I managed to get to the store, and to my surprise everyone was there. Or at least, everyone that mattered. Half the cashiers arrived an hour late, the customers didn't even bother to show up. With a bit of that stuff that the Coffee Shop dares to call coffee, I managed to wake myself up, although my body was refusing any type of co-operation. The following syntoms are usually visible when there is a high degree of lack of sleep:
- Inability to construct coherent sentences.
- Being a gibbering idiot.. or at least, more then usual.
- Sudden memory loss. No one seems to remember where the dairy is
although one of the clerks (we don't know who) is probably working
on it as we speak.
- The lack of energy in doing just about anything in the store.
- It takes a good half hour to remember what was the last thing
that one is supposed to do. Once finally found, it takes
another half an hour to tackle the situation ("should I fill the
eggs first, or first the milk?").
- No one is able to laugh (or at least pretend to) or be a bit
diplomatic when a customer says the usual phrase "working hard, eh?".
Daylight Time Savings are an incredible torture. They take an hour of your sleep away just so that you can get an extra hour of daylight. Already I sleep very little because I can't tell myself to stop what I am doing, and you take an hour away from the little sleep I get? I think that they should add an hour each day, so we get to sleep an hour more each day. Every night we move the clocks one hour behind, waking up the next morning more relaxed and more productive. Who cares if I wake up one morning and it's actually 4 in the morning. My body will think it's 7AM anyway, I'll be more energetic, and really, if you think about it it makes not much of a difference: I can't see the light of the day when I'm in the office anyway.
---
A quick notion why Word for Windows '97 sucks: The word Daylight Time Savings. First Windows tells me that Time Savings should be written "TimeSavings", so I correct it. A red squiggly line replaces the green one to inform me that it should instead be written as "timesavings". So I correct it. I start typing again, when another red squiggly line appears under that word. It wants me to remove the 's' and change the word to "timesaving". Again, I do that. The sentence therefore had mutated to "Daylight timesaving are ..." and I'm thinking that this time I finally got it right. But Word still had something to say. It informs me with a green line that "timesaving are" should be "timesaving is" or "timesavingS are": so I pick the latter. Word is finally happy for a minute when another red line suddenly appears saying that it should be "timesaving" and not "timesavings"... software paradoxes...
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