Time Warps...

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Be afraid, be very, very afraid! Daylight Saving Time, known in the UK as "British Summer Time" is once more to be foist upon us this coming weekend, on the 25th of March 2018, at 1am. That's a Sunday morning, by the way. You have been warned! Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days Of Summer British Summer Time - why do we do it? Sunday morning, you'll probably wake up, look blearily at the clock and dawdle into what should be a sedate Sunday morning routine, only to find that you are being treated to the Archers Omnibus instead of Broadcasting House - where'd that hour go? Autumn Leaves Don't worry - it's only transitory because, guess what? They give you the hour back again, sans interest, when when the clocks fall back by an hour on the last Sunday in October, at 2am! If I had to choose one of these annual time-warping events, I'd take the October "blip" - here's why: Each of us gets the opportunity, once a year, to re-live an hour of our lives - and the powers-that-be make us wait until 02:00 to do it! Why couldn't the hour go back when I was enjoying a particularly good moment in my life, and I'd get to go through it all again, in the style of Groundhog Day. Or give me a chance to rectify that particularly bad choice of words I used with so-and-so in the pub, I'm sure I'd get it right the second time around. No, they have to go change it at some ungodly hour when I am too far out of it to notice. The hour going back wreaks havoc with the central heating, your PC tells you that "Windows has auto-adjusted your clock, is that ok?", and the bread you put into the machine to be ready at 9am is now a sweaty lump instead of a crusty cob. Worse yet, that late-night bit of phwoooar TV program you thought you'd set the video to record from 00:45 until 02:15 has half-recorded and then caught 45mins of "get your ringtones here" adverts, or similar (!), if anything. How do factories handle it? Automated production lines churning out dongles that have to be baked for exactly 98.25mins - which have had their cooking-time extended by an hour as 01:59:59 came and madly reset the thing back to 01:00:00... What about hole-in-the-wall cash machines/auto-tellers? I wonder if I withdraw £20.00 at 01:30 in old currency, can I go back to the same machine and withdraw another £10.00 an hour later at 01:30 and only get £10.00 deducted from my account? White is in the Winter Night Anyway - that's enough for now, I wouldn't want to add to the sense of loss you're going to feel this weekend as UK plc borrows an hour from you for about 7 months - don't wait up for the event, they don't thank you for it!