Fooling with Daylight Saving

Being from a small country Nepal, I was surprised with time zones within a Country. I remember when I first landed in Washington DC then had to take a flight to St. Louis. DC is in Eastern time zone while St. Louis in Central (Others: Colorado in Mountain time zone and California in Pacific time zone). I set my clock to DC time and looked at my itinerary to calculate the time it takes to reach St. Louis. When I reached St. Louis, I checked my watch to see that we were 1 hour late than schedule; how can a plane be delayed by 1 hour while in flight? It took me some time to understand that in my itinerary all the arrival times were the local time and there exists something called the time zone.

After absorbing the concept of time zone within a country, I had to face something new again: Daylight Saving. Yes Daylight Saving, where you either turn your clock ahead by one hour or behind by one hour. For instance; in the year 2007 the second Sunday of March at 2:00 a.m., local standard time was set ahead one hour so that the local time
would be 3:00 a.m. Now, at first Sunday of November (2007) the clock will be set back one hour at 2:00 a.m. local time so that it will become 1:00 a.m. These Daylight Savings were established primarily for saving of energy by the maximum use of daylight (Energy Policy Act).

So this coming week I can wake up one hour late than usual for work. I bet if you have work/school in the morning and after you wake up you always wish if you could go on sleeping for one more hour, especially if it’s a chilly winter time. Last year I did something that people thought were weird but it works fine on me. My body is used to current sleeping and waking up time, so like last year I am not going to change my clock for at least a week. I’ll go to sleep at usual time and wake up at the usual time, however after waking up I will set my alarm clock one hour later again and then go back to sleep. That will give an extra hour of sleep after waking up.

One might say what’s the point; you could always have gone to bed one hour earlier and then have done the same thing. However I find this is different because my body is used to current sleeping/waking up time since March, so suddenly doing this “weird” stuff is fun for me. On the hindsight, I would have to stay at the office one hour longer than what my watch says, but I feel I am more into morning sleep than the extra hour at work.

I know most people will raise their eyebrows when they hear this, but frankly I love doing it. And, this pleasure starts diminishing quickly after a week as you get used to your surrounding, people who go by the corrected time.