Blame it on Bennie

I had been searching for an internship for months. Finally, with less than four weeks of school left, I got a call back from The State Journal in Frankfort, Ky.\n"Come on down for an interview with the rest of the editors next Friday," the editor said.\nI'm raring to go, and come Friday morning, I'm off and pacing. This has been my only callback the entire year, and I'm desperate to make a great first impression. I cruise the 160 miles down to Frankfort and arrive an hour late.\nWhose fault was it I nearly throttled my chances before I got there? Well, I suppose technically it was my fault, but I prefer to blame Benjamin Franklin.\nDear old Bennie, I discovered in my quest to find a scapegoat, was a bit of a night owl. He liked staying out until 4 a.m. and resurfacing slightly after noon. One day, he was rudely awakened at the ungodly hour of six in the morning and made a startling scientific discovery, which he subsequently detailed in a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784.\n"Your readers," Franklin wrote, "who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of (the sun) rising so early; and especially when I assure them that he gives light as soon as he rises."\nFranklin followed this lightning bolt of observation with a resounding thunderclap of an idea.\n"Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient, let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest."\nThe interest Franklin refers to is thrift. His idea was to beat people into open-eyed submission at the wee hours in order to save on candles. If people utilized free, natural light and slept through the entire night, this would cut the cost of candles immensely.\nFranklin should have known better than to start thinking as soon as he woke up at 6 a.m. In a fit of bleary-eyed analysis, he gave us Daylight-Saving Time version 1.0.\nWayne's World time warp to present day: All of America switches to DST the first Sunday of April.\nAll except Indiana, that is.\nSo, there are three possible solutions to my problem. The first is I personally keep track of the world's idiosyncrasies, but that would be entirely too easy. The second is Indiana finally catch up with the rest of the world and move to DST like everybody else. The third option, by process of elimination, is for America to acquiesce to Hoosier stubbornness, drop 60 years of tradition and stop using DST.\nYou're damn right we choose option three!\nYou see, in reality, we've perverted Franklin's idea by moving our clocks forward. His sole suggestion was to get up with the sun. I hate to break it to all those die-hard DST users, but you're fooling yourselves. You got up at 8 a.m. April 3 and you're getting up at 7 a.m. April 4. I know it; you know it; everybody knows it. So stop playing tricks; leave the clocks alone and just get up earlier!\nSee? Problem solved.