Time eludes everyone, and sometimes I feel it eludes me more than it does others. I’m chronically late, and I think it might be actually be hereditary after I had to wait over half an hour at the airport before my siblings could pick me up when I travelled to my home country recently. Anyway, as someone who is always late, having a list of commendable excuses under my sleeve is only a necessity. From ‘my roommate accidentally locked me in my room’ to ‘my cousin’s hamster went into cardiac arrest’ I’ve used every imaginable excuse to justify being late for an appointment.

My favorite excuse is that I forgot to take daylight savings time into account.

Of the several experiences I have addressed as an alien in the U.S., my experience with daylight savings time was one that saw me leave the comfort of my caged opinions and research my way over to the other side of the argument.

How did it work? Did they merely treat certain hours vestigially? The concept seemed bizarre.

I had vehemently maintained the opinion that this was laziness and stubbornness at its extremist best. Why couldn’t people just accept the fact that the sunrises were delayed and the sunsets earlier during the winter and vice versa? Why wouldn’t they just work around these changes instead of redefining the entire system? It felt like an unnecessary complication.

You may argue the shift to 1 a.m. from 2 a.m. doesn’t really affect anyone since there is rarely anything scheduled at that time. But for one, I can see it being highly inconvenient for people making and receiving booty calls. Imagine all the time keeping acrobatics people would have to perform in order to keep things functional.

“I thought you were going to be here at the other 1:30 a.m.” must probably be a commonly heard phrase for them.

George Hudson obviously didn’t think daylight savings time through.

After getting over my frustration of missing a couple of classes by being blissfully unaware of these changes, I now see how tropical countries can get away without the need to readjust our clocks, while countries in the temperate and polar zones can’t. The odd hours the sunlight maintained seemed to puzzle me as I experienced my first summer and winter out here.

Diving into the topic of time keeping only opened my eyes to how little we are taught about something we by for every moment.