A $imple $olution to $olve D$T | Sam Venable
As a card-carrying member of ECFFGA (Easily Confused Fumble-Fingered Geezers of America), I bring good tidings of great joy to those in the senior set who dread the coming and going of daylight saving time.
As we Metamucil-guzzlers know, the central issue of this twice-annual torture isn’t the hour added or subtracted from our day. We’re retired croaks, for Pete’s sake. Doesn’t matter if we’re “springing forward” or “falling back.” What’s time to us?
What does matter, however, is the mind-boggling process of accomplishing the &%$#@!-ing task of resetting clocks.
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The first step is plumbing 4,382 pages in every manual that comes with a clock to find the instructions.
(Oops, I got ahead of myself. We can’t consult the owner’s manual until we find our reading glasses. Do manual publishers compete to see who can use the smallest type? I digress.)
Then comes a more daunting chore: punching a series of buttons that we can neither see nor feel. Nor do we have any idea what the buttons are supposed to do in the first place.
As anyone over 65 knows, ECFFGAers are not programmed to do buttons. We do dials.
We are comfortable and confident twisting dials and seeing immediate results. With buttons, it’s a crapshoot.
We push a button as instructed, hold it for a second, then push a different button the required two times and hit “set.”
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Maybe, if we are exceedingly lucky, the desired change appears. More than likely, however, we have just detonated a nuclear device in Utah.
But in a recent phone conversation with fellow ECFFGAer Richard Coleman, I saw the light. Richard, who lives in Greenback, is 82 and retired after teaching biology and geology at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin.
“I’m a science guy,” he explained. “I try to keep up with technology, but everything changes so often, I’m constantly in a dither.”
As we talked, particularly in matters of clock setting, the solution to our conundrum became abundantly clear.
Simply buy two houses in each time zone across the country, one for DST and another for standard time. Have your grandchildren set all the clocks correctly at each respective site. Then jump in the car and hopscotch around the map as needed.
Brilliant!
Sure, that’s a rather expensive undertaking. But thanks to the cost-of-living windfall recently bestowed on us by Social Security, we gonna have money running out of the wazoo.
Even enough to buy extra car keys and reading glasses to leave at each house. We’re bound to have misplaced ’em somewhere along the line.
Sam Venable’s column appears every Sunday. Contact him at sam.venable@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Sam Venable: A $imple $olution to $olve D$T
