BAD TIMING

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who wants to know, but why are we still putting our clocks back­wards and for­wards twice a year? The end of March saw us once again chang­ing the time on our clocks as part of the twice-yearly day­light sav­ing rit­ual that we’ve been told, on nu­mer­ous oc­ca­sions, is on its last legs.

In 2019, the Eu­ro­pean Union left the de­ci­sion to per­ma­nently set clocks to sum­mer or win­ter time in the hands of each mem­ber state. I as­sume this was an ex­er­cise in pass­ing the buck, as the EU is not nor­mally so ret­i­cent when lay­ing down the law to its mem­bers.

While the ini­tial dead­line to in­tro­duce the mea­sure was 2021, the whole de­bate is still up in the air three years later. Since then, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment has an­nounced that no change will be in­tro­duced until “at least” 2026.

This pro­cras­ti­na­tion is de­spite ex­perts from all sorts of fields as­sur­ing us that aban­don­ing the bian­nual time change will im­prove our econ­omy, our health and our en­ergy con­sump­tion. I would like to add an­other po­ten­tial ben­e­fit to ’lock­ing the clock’, which is that it would re­duce the stress lev­els of peo­ple who don’t know how to change the clocks of their ve­hi­cles.

I don’t have a phys­i­cal users man­ual for my mo­tor­bike and so I have to find one on­line when­ever I need in­for­ma­tion about how to, for ex­am­ple, ad­just the bike’s clock. I never re­mem­ber which but­tons to press and I’m re­luc­tant to just push but­tons at ran­dom in case the wheels fall off or some­thing.

How­ever, be­fore I get to that point I have to re­mem­ber that the clock needs chang­ing in the first place, and that only hap­pens when I turn on the en­gine to go some­where, usu­ally in a rush. Nat­u­rally, in that sit­u­a­tion, I don’t re­ally have the time to turn off the en­gine, take off my hel­met, fish out my house key, go up­stairs and turn on the com­puter, open the browser to search for the on­line man­ual (which I keep for­get­ting to save in my favourites folder), only to re­alise I don’t know the exact model and so I have to go back down­stairs and get the bike’s pa­pers, go back up­stairs, do a Google search to find the right man­ual, find the page that tells you how to change the clock, make a note of the pro­ce­dure, go back down­stairs and ad­just the clock be­fore fi­nally be­gin­ning my jour­ney. When that hap­pens, which is every time I get on the bike to go some­where, I shrug it off and promise I’ll make the change when I get home, which I don’t, of course.

The last time I for­got to change the bike clock was in Oc­to­ber and by the time it got to Jan­u­ary I had ac­cepted de­feat and de­cided to wait it out until the end of March when the clocks would go for­ward and the time would be right again. In fact, I got so used to the time on my bike being an hour ahead that my mind au­to­mat­i­cally sub­tracted the extra hour, fur­ther re­mov­ing any mo­ti­va­tion to ad­just the clock. Come the end of March, I as­sured my­self, the issue would be solved, at least for an­other six months.

Then last month, the sub­ject of the mo­tor­bike clock was over­shad­owed by en­gine trou­ble and it be­came clear that it would have to go to the me­chanic. Easter was fast ap­proach­ing but I man­aged to get an ap­point­ment a cou­ple of days be­fore the hol­i­day week­end, when I needed the bike be­cause I was going on a trip with my friends. I picked up the bike on the Thurs­day evening be­fore Good Fri­day, happy that I would have it over Easter. Until I turned the ig­ni­tion and looked at the dig­i­tal screen: a few days be­fore the clocks were due to go for­ward and the time on my in­cor­rect bike clock would once again be right, the me­chanic had done me the “favour” of ad­just­ing the time. Now, a few days into April my bike clock is once again wrong, this time an hour be­hind, and I am back to square one.

Please, pow­ers-that-be, get rid of this ridicu­lous rit­ual as soon as pos­si­ble!

Opin­ion