Notice anything missing this morning?
Something precious and valuable was taken away from you, most likely while you were sleeping.
Something that the wise cherish, the unwise waste and those participating in one form of pleasure or another can't ever get enough of.
Don't bother calling and reporting it missing.
There's not a jimmied door, broken window, picked lock, rifled drawer or even a foreign fingerprint in your house to prove that any nefarious activity took place.
But it was yours.
And it's gone, baby.
Admittedly, a case can be made that it wasn't, in fact, stolen, that it was, rather, merely borrowed because just as surely as the sun rises and sets, as night follows day, as your teenager will say or wear something today that will make you question your intelligence at having had kids, it will be returned to you.
And it will be put back just as it was taken from you.
Late at night, somewhere in that ethereal space between the stroke of midnight and the wee hours of the morning, replaced in exactly the same spot it from which it was taken, again with no tangible or court worthy forensic evidence that it was ever even tampered with, let alone taken from your possession and held in a metaphorical escrow.
And it happens to everyone, with the exception of a select few who remain immune to the loss with no more complicated a defensive strategy than to choose to live in a few select places
No charges can be filed, no complaint officially lodged for this particular act of acquisition isn't prohibited or even discouraged by any statue, federal, state or local.
It is, in fact, mandated by law.
And because there is no violation of law and no charges filed, there can be no one accused, tried, convicted and/or punished for the action.
No one to hold accountable.
There is, though, something, and someone, to blame.
Candles.
And Benjamin Franklin.
Seems that the zany old kite flyer shared an idea, some many years ago, that would save his friends in France some serious francs by cutting down on the number of candles they needed to burn each night to keep from having to curse the darkness.
The trick, Declaration-boy suggested, was to simply limit the duration of the darkness.
But while Ben was a pretty sharp tool, he was no Gene Roddenberry and messing around with the sun/earth rotation ratios was a skosh beyond even his considerable grasp.
So, he did the next best Star Trekkian thing.
He suggested a little ratchet wrenching of the space/time continuum.
And in what has to, admittedly, be a pretty ingenious example of getting around not being able to raise the bridge by lowering the river, he invented that which came into our homes and places of business last night and left with that aforementioned precious and valuable possession.
One hour of our lives.
And while Daylight Savings Time became, and remains, a very popular concept amongst the vast majority, a clever mind could still, I think, advocate convincingly that it is, in fact, a theft of sorts.
If only because that precious hour is, rather than plucked out of the day during business hours when each and all could view it as a extra bonus mini vacation, so to speak, taken from us, instead, in the dead of night, while we sleep....
...during our weekend.
Can't speak for you, but waking up Sunday morning to find that, through no fault of my own, I'm sixty minutes closer to Monday morning than usual leaves me feeling a little robbed.
And all because the French were too damn cheap to pop for a few extra candles.
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