November 11, 2026
Super star Cher has a song where she croons out the line, “If I could turn back time.” Well, this should be her favorite time of the year because on November 1st she could turn back time. We all could! Well, everyone could except those fine folks living in Arizona, who have decided that changing back and forth from standard time to daylight-saving time is just a little more hassle than they want to deal with. But for the rest of us, this is that blessed time in the fall when we gain an hour to replace that hour we lost in the spring. This biannual tradition, and all-around pain in the neck, is carried out so we can all experience the joys of evening sunlight in the summer while experiencing a sunset in the middle of the afternoon during the winter. Although this sounds like a creation of government bureaucracy at its best, daylight savings time was first proposed by New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson in 1897. So if you don’t like it, blame the folks down under.
While most people enjoy having a long evening of sunlight in the summer, there’s always a few grumblings about the five o’clock sunsets in the fall and winter. During my night shift working career I would find myself driving to work in the dark half the year while driving home in the dark the other half of the year. But now that I’m retired, the time change really doesn’t mean squat to me.
For years though, fall back and spring forward did mean something to my wife and I! Indeed, those two moments of the year especially meant something to us glorious shift workers! My wife Margaret worked a day shift where she worked every Sunday, and that losing or gaining an hour in the middle of the night was pretty substantial! For the normal people of the world, when the time change went into effect on Sunday morning at 2:00 am that just meant that the church goers would have to get up an hour earlier or later in order to make morning service while the heathens just slept in and didn’t care. For my wife though, who had a 7:00 am work start time along with an hour-long commute to Dallas, these time changes could be pretty significant…or downright brutal! Where fall back gave her an extra hour of slumber, the idea of losing an hour of sleep during spring forward was pretty horrific! Common sense might have told her to just go to bed an hour earlier in preparation for such a jolt to her sleep schedule, but yea, that never happened.
Being a night shifter, I never had to worry about losing an hour of sleep. My problem was a bit more involved. When my work schedule fell upon those blessed Saturday/Sunday nights when the time changed, I would either gain or lose an hour of work time. On those days when we sprung forward my shift would be cut by an hour which meant I either had to use an hour of vacation to make up for it or just lose that hour of pay. It also screwed me up because 2:00 am was usually my lunchtime. Oh yea! That little mishap just threw my whole routine into pandemonium! Now I had to get everything done in eleven hours that usually took me twelve hours! For those times when we fell back in the fall, we just got to enjoy an extra hour of being at work. Some of the less dedicated workers found this to be nothing more than an agonizing pain in the neck, but for me this just meant that I got an extra hour of pay! Not only that, but it was an extra hour of time and a half overtime! Oh happy day! Apparently, not all my co-workers shared such an optimistic view though. With the awful thought of having an extra hour added to our twelve hour shift a lot of people found a reason to either schedule a vacation day or call in sick for that shift. As far as they were concerned, that extra hour at work was a horrific tragedy that would mar them for the rest of the year! Although I found such to be a bonus, they considered it nothing less than a travesty! These were usually the same people who often complained about not having any money as well. Go figure.
. My first memory of daylight-saving time was when I was nine years old and spent a week at church camp. Although I never left the state of Oklahoma, in my young brain I was still a long ways from home. With that in mind, I asked one of the adult councilors if daylight-saving time still applied in this far away and strange land. I just remember the guy letting out a chuckle and assured me that southern Oklahoma kept the same time practices as my home in central Oklahoma did. Well, that was certainly a load off my nine-year-old mind
So what about my sixty-two-year-old, retired mind? Well, the only thing that the time change means to me now is the fact that I have to go reset all my clocks. This usually means I have to break out my owner’s manual on my 2009 Chevy truck because I can’t remember how I reset my clock during last spring when we sprung forward. I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about such an issue because while in college I had a friend that never could figure out how to change the time on his digital wristwatch. As a result, the guy just settled for having his watch off an hour for six months out of the year. Setting all the digital clocks on my oven, microwave oven, and clock radio (yes, I still use a clock radio) really isn’t that big of a deal to me because for some reason the electricity flickers around my neighborhood so much that I have to reset all the digital clocks nearly every month anyway. As for the wall clock in my office, I stuck it so high up on my wall that I have to bring in a ladder from my garage to reset it. This usually kicks in my procrastination talent, and by the time I finally get around to the clock setting duty, the next time change is a mere month or two away, so why bother. In my mind adding or subtracting an hour for six months is far easier than hauling in the ladder and resetting the blessed thing.
In this modern age, most clocks set themselves during the time changes. Well, I’ll say that until I woke up to discover that not only had my Fitbit wristwatch not changed to standard time, but it had wigged out to the point where it wasn’t anywhere close to the right time. I thought everything in the modern age was supposed to be automatic. Setting the blessed thing to the right time was a total nightmare! After downloading apps, chatting with AI support on the internet, and watching a few instructional videos on YouTube, not to mention giving up two hours of my life, I finally got the thing set to the right time. So much for modern conveniences. I miss my old Mickey Mouse watch where all I had to do was move Mickey’s big arm around the dial.
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