Daylight Savings Time Daymare
Monday, March 15th, 2010Jonathan Messier was all set to attend an early morning Neuro Linguistic Programming seminar and finally change his life. Unfortunately, he’d failed to figure in the time change on the morrow. This failure led to a series of mishaps that might have proved financially fatal if it hadn’t been for a California Health Insurance agent.
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He’d wanted to be normal since he’d been a boy. At 34, his bedroom was still littered with a menagerie of stuffed animals that provoked snide comments from his girlfriends – all the wrong kind of women anyway because they tended to be mother figures. He had to break these childhood patterns once and for all, and he’d settled on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) as a cure.
His first mistake was going to bed, as usual in the shadow of Tony the Tiger and Gisele the Giraffe, each towering above his head on each side of his pillow, propped up in their verticality by the bed’s antique oaken headboard, without bothering to turn his alarm clock an hour ahead for the first day of Daylight Savings Time. He had to arrive promptly at 8 a.m. at the Escondido NLP center to begin his life-changing all day seminar, centered upon combating the subjectivity that had so far made life without such imaginative creatures as Tony, Gisele, and their assorted brethren unthinkable.
The trouble began at 7:55 a.m. Daylight Savings Time when Maybelline, a matronly woman of 49 who loved to dote on “her Jonny,” called and roused him from a last minute half-asleep reverie. Jonathan was going to get up anyway in five minutes, as his alarm was set for 7:00 a.m. standard time.
“Hi May,” he said drowsily, “How come you’re calling so early?”
“Early,” she said, “It’s five minutes before eight. Don’t you have to be in Escondido at eight? It’s Daylight Savings, don’t you know?”
“Damn!” Jonathan exclaimed, “You’re right! I got to go!” Within ten minutes he’d completed his morning ablutions and was out the door without so much as a goodbye for Tony or Gisele.
But he drove too fast. The accident happened just a mile from the center, a lamp post he didn’t see in time, a gouged radiator, a sprained ankle, an attempt to run, a collapse … he woke up in a hospital bed, a semi-private room. A doctor was asking about whether he was covered, Jonathan answered in the affirmative, mumbled something about a California Health Insurance agent.
Suddenly, he saw them. Opening his eyes fully, he knew that he wasn’t alone. Somebody had brought Tony & Gisele and also a big stuffed dog, to keep him company.



