HomeOwnerMan is socially conscious. He’s been known to save a tree, or save the whales, and occasionally, when the fancy-schmancy envelopes come in the mail, he’s been known to save the date. But recently the talk in the superhero circles had turned to saving daylight. Mankind had spent all winter winnowing away daylight. Everyone drove their daylight-guzzling SUVs and forgot to turn off the sun when they came inside. When they were through charging up their battery-operated daylight they didn’t take the time to reach down and unplug their daylight chargers. This let daylight leak out of the trickle-charger and make a puddle of daylight on the floor.
In short, everyone was talking about saving daylight, but no one was doing anything about it. And HomeOwnerMan had a hunch why: no mortal man could save daylight on his own. It would take a superhero like HomeOwnerMan and an idea that had been around for thousands of years and was first implemented in Germany about 100 years ago. The original German idea went like this: “What if we deprive everyone of an hour of sleep on the second weekend in March? That will get them to stop complaining about wasting daylight.” It was a diabolical plan, but it actually yielded some good things, like plunging early morning commuters back into the pitch darkness from which they were finally beginning to emerge. And since the rest of the free world, except for a few exceptionally backward counties in Indiana, Michigan, and the Navajo Nation observed it anyway, HomeOwnerMan thought this would be an easy gig. But he was wrong, and he was about to be enlightened.
For one thing, Daylight Savings Time usually fell around HomeOwnerMan’s birthday, casting a damp, moldy blanket over the birthday festivities. Honestly, HomeOwnerMan would probably be in bed anyway, but it gave him a good excuse to be there on his birthday weekend. Secondly, it always fell on Saturday night / Sunday morning. Why? Why not Tuesday so you could go to work groggy on Wednesday? And thirdly, why was it scheduled for the middle of the night? Why not go from 3:59 PM to 5:00 PM, jumping from late-afternoon snack right to quitting time? No one would complain about that. But that is not the way it works, is it?
As luck would have it, HomeOwnerMan and WifeGirl were scheduled to sleep at a friend’s house for daylight savings time this year. This presented a difficult first challenge- the dreaded guest room clock from the 70’s. The 70’s were great for many things such as glitter-wearing horn bands and jarts. But in the arena of time pieces it was dominated by red LED clocks with “time”, “slow” and “fast” buttons. HomeOwnerMan had long ago mastered the “press and hold the ‘time’ button while simultaneously pressing either the ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ button” routine of this genre. The clock said 11:17 and since the clock only needed to go an hour ahead, HomeOwnerMan started by using ‘slow’ button. But it progressed at a snails pace, so HomeOwnerMan foolishly touched the ‘fast’ button. The clock suddenly rocketed forward stopping at 12:21, three minutes past the appointed time. That necessitated the maneuver known as “going around the horn.” This time he stopped at 12:16, but now he had to decide if another minute had lapsed while making the rounds. Should he go to 12:18 or 12:19? And wait, was the clock 12 hours off? 12:19 was in the AM realm so that would mean that the PM dot, a standard indicator on 70’s clocks, should be off rather than on. So this guest clock must have been off by 12 hours at least since the previous power failure. He advanced it to the next 12:19 (with no PM dot), and then debated with himself like Lincoln and Douglas whether it was now 12:20.
The next morning was uneventful at first. Returning home from their soirée with plenty of time before the 11:30 Mass, a Mass they rarely attend, HomeOwnerMan had time to make the sweep of the house – the microwave, the range, the wall clocks, and the DVD player. On the way to church he fixed the car clock, complete with uninterpretable German universal symbols on the controls. In church they saw plenty of sub-humans who were normally from earlier Masses who had forgotten to spring forward. HomeOwnerMan knew he was better than them, and was over-confident that he had all of his bases covered. He went to bed Sunday night having all but forgotten about daylight savings time.
The alarm went off Monday morning at 5:00 AM. HomeOwnerMan woke up feeling that all was right with the world. It was dark outside, which it should be just after “spring forward.” He unfurled his yoga mat, and began twisting himself into a pretzel. But he suddenly realized that his “pigeon prep” felt more like “frozen pigeon.” The bedroom was colder than a brass casket. HomeOwnerMan was once again foiled by the “spring-forward-fall-backward-set-back-thermostat.” It was the thing he forgot every daylight Sunday and was always rudely and briskly reminded on daylight Monday.
Making his way in the dark to the thermostat wearing an undershirt and yoga pants, he looked through blurry eyes at the array of buttons labeled “mode”, “fan”. “prog”, “^”, “v” and “hold”, and a clock that said “Mon 4:05 AM”. There was also a set of instructions that were printed in 0.2 point minimicromidget font. He punched a few buttons and the display lit up. The word “Hold” illuminated; he looked at the temperature which read “62°”. “Hold” would be bad at this temperature, so he forged on like a S.W.A.T. member diffusing a bomb. Finally “Mon” started to flash, which meant he had stumbled into “time set mode.” A few button-clicks later, the heat whirred into action and the time was finally set correctly. There would be no frozen pigeon today.
HomeOwnerMan: making the ordinary extra ordinary.
