View from the North 40: Huh, the time change has a sucker punch

Twice a year, when the time change comes around, I am stunned by the amount of whining and complaining people do over one hour of sleep more or less.

It’s an hour, not the end of times, you’ll survive. You’ll even adjust; it’s true.

You will adjust, your pets will adjust, your kids will adjust, your bio-rythms will adjust, even your clocks will adjust given a minimum of effort on your part.

It’s not like the sun stops shining, the earth stops spinning on its proper axis or the Milky Way loses its starry glow. You don’t even have to pay for an extra hour of sunlight.

You know what it is like? It’s like when the manufacturer of my preferred brand of toilet paper cut the width of the toilet paper by a half inch and increased the diameter of the cardboard core, thus significantly reducing the amount of toilet paper per roll, but then made an adjustment by adding some TP squares to the reduced-amount roll and said “33% More Per Roll!!”

Uh, no, TP man, I’m pretty sure it equals the square yardage of TP that you had in the first place, the rolls just looks fuller because you’ve mucked things around a bit.

It’s still a 24-hour day. You’ll work X-hours, you get to sleep X-hours, you just have to muck things about for a bit.

Plus, in the end, daylight saving time is better than the TP deal because I think the company is charging extra for the “33% more!” So, yay, for you, time change. You aren’t a marketing scam!

I was mid eye-roll over someone’s time-change conniption fit when it occurred to me that my dog has to have insulin shots twice a day. This doesn’t seem like a problem on the surface because all our days — even the day that the time change occurs — are still physically 24 hours long, however, my dog needs his insulin shots every 12 hours.

What’s the problem, you might ask. Well, when I say every I mean exactly.

He needs his shots exactly 12 hours apart — at 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. — so the problem then is: On Sunday, my alarm will go off at 6:30 a.m., but the new 6:30 is the old 5:30 because the old 6:30 is the new 7:30. Therefore, this Sunday morning, 7:30 is exactly 12 hours after Saturday’s 6:30 in the evening.

This is fine for Sunday, but Monday I have to be to work at 7:30 a.m. In fact, I should be to work by 7 a.m., which is why he gets his shot at 6:30.

So all of a sudden, little miss get-over-yourself-it’s-just-an-hour is now in a pickle. I can’t just spring-forward his shot time by a whole 60 minutes. This has to be done in 5-minute increments each time a shot is given. It’s going to take me days to get him switched over.

Now, all of a sudden, I am one of “those people,” the hysterical time-change people, and I have to figure out whether I start giving the shot five minutes earlier each time or five minutes later. Then I start having a math meltdown like it’s a calculus problem rather than a logic problem requiring rudimentary math skills.

But what is it? Addition or subtraction?

So then I think, hey, I have the internet of things to assist in this, but then I start in on an English language meltdown trying to figure out how I would word that question for a Google search. “Google, how do I not kill my dog with insulin during the time change!?!” is the only wording that comes to mind.

Because, yes, ohmigawd, I could kill my dog over this!

Best case scenario in the screwup department, I cause a really expensive problem — in which case then, yeah, I am paying for the time change.

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Rules of Life, No. 1: Irony is applicable in all situations at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.