Quelle horreur! Daylight Saving Time officially begins at 2 a.m. Sunday morning, or in party people terms, “2 a.m. tonight”. That means we’ll be setting our clocks forward in the wee hours this evening — even though it’s still early March and we are still technically in the season of winter for another week. “Spring” forward, indeed.
Despite the loss of an hour of your life and the sheer misery you will feel waking up for work Monday morning, there are some relative advantages to Daylight Saving Time. Sunlight hours will be extended later, so we will ostensibly be more active. There is theoretically less energy usage during DST (though this is debated). We do see fewer traffic collisions during Daylight Saving Time. But if you have circadian rhythms, boy is this switch going to fuck those babies up.
And allow us to point out that it’s “Daylight Saving Time”, not “Daylight Savings Time”. It is incorrect to put an ‘s’ on the “Saving”. This is just American slang that somehow caught on.
The funniest irony of Daylight Savings Time is that we stole the idea from Germany while we were at war with Germany. According to Wikipedia — so you know it must be true — the United States adopted Daylight Saving Time during World War I after seeing Germany do so to conserve coal. Congress repealed DST in 1919, only to have FDR reinstate it in 1942 under the name “War Time”. You gotta admit, “War Time” is a pretty badass name for it.
Regardless of what you call it, and you will have some choice words for it Monday morning, Daylight Saving Time goes into effect tonight and remains so until November 6, 2016.