Daylight Savings Time Wasted

Last night at 2am the clocks went back an hour (it was spooky when the computer clock went from 1:59 to 1:00 automatically). For me, this was nothing new, as I have turned the clocks back in more than half my 27 years. For Bonnie, a Saskatchewan girl, it was a new and exciting element of living in Ontario. I promised her that we would get an extra hour of sleep, ostensibly. We went to bed thinking that we would finally catch up on sleep – an hour here or there is all you need sometimes. However, at 3 / 4 am this ringing noise woke us from our slumber; confused at first, we both felt that the ringing was a natural occurrence: annoying, yes, but regular. We each had dreams with ringing and it wasn’t until 5 or so minutes of actual ringing that we realized we weren’t dreaming. In fact, we realized we had to get out of the building – now (later, we realized that we had to improve our response time; 15mins is not “reacting quickly”). We bundled up and grabbed certain necessities and hit the stairwell. We had been through a fire alarm once before, but that was at 6pm; it was okay to leave during the day, but what about the middle of the night? Isn’t that just more inconvenience than safety? Well, we couldn’t risk it, and we headed outside with the myriad others who wouldn’t risk it, either (oddly, we recognized these people as the same people as last time – I dubbed us “The Unjaded”). We marched down the stairs (again, 18 floors) with other like-minded people: there were people with babies, people in housecoats, people with cats (one cat wailed and wailed “meows” through the stairwell – it was like some Poe story or something). Luckily, it was only about 2 degrees Celsius outside, and thus not bone-chillingly cold. We waited the obligatory time while the firefighters went into the building and ensured that everyone was safe – it turns out, again, that the only thing in danger was our peace and quiet: some 14th floor hooligan pulled the alarm for no good reason. Bonnie wants me to rail against this person or persons, but it does seem a little funny. And no one was hurt; still, I don’t want it happen every month! (that’s the frequency so far). In the end, the hoopla left us eventually falling back to sleep by 4 / 5 – after an hour of being awake. So while we got to change the clocks back, we were not given that extra hour of badly-needed sleep.