Daylight Savings is absolute hogwash.

This is not just another notch on the belt of “things that New South Wales does stupidly”, this is a pair of braces that have gone up so many notches that the wearer has a camel toe and a bleeding perineum.

It all started a few weeks ago – two, if my memory serves correctly, but because of the way this ridiculous concept has altered my cranial activity and concept of time, who knows! I was laying in bed on a Sunday, having just been awoken by the mysteriously sophisticated and unbelievably reliable timing of my body clock. I had a quick squiz at the time and was perplexed. “What the 6am?” I wondered to myself (well probably not word-for-word, because your thoughts are rarely formed in words, with sentences and correct syntax – they’re more conceptual and responsive. For example: *hears conversation about wedding rings* – brain replays that scene on The Simpsons when Bart and Lisa blow into their special red and white swirly whistle rings. *giggles to self* followed by a struggle to briefly summarise the scene and provide a verbal link as to why you thought of that… this may be a conversation for another time.) You see, I’ve been rising at around 7am, so for my body to automatically wake me up an hour earlier made very little sense. This made me think that perhaps I had been woken up by my bod to attend to other businesses than purely just being awake. Did I need to go to the bathroom? Had I forgotten someone’s birthday? Was there a ghost trying to entre my brain through my ear passage?

After a few minutes, I drifted back to sleep. I carried about my day as per usual. I went to the gym. I watched TV. I tried to shut out the sound of a baby magpie struggling for life in front of its clearly unimpressed parents. But something felt off. Then, when it was 6.30pm and the sun was still hanging about, it hit me. And it hit me hard.

Now, I’m nearly at the point of my word limit where I would start wrapping things up (or at least getting to the point), but I am far too enraged to be adhering to self-imposed limitations. I have things to say, dammit!

Daylight Savings is a foolish idea that makes very little sense. I hear people harping on about the extra hour of sunlight in the evenings, but people fail to mention that hour was robbed from the morning.

Now I don’t know about you, but one of the best things about the weather being warmer is that it becomes incredibly easy to get out of bed. And considering I had just moved to one of the chilliest places in the country, I was counting on the fact that heat would speed up my morning routine. But along comes Daylight Savings who effectively turns on the figurative atmospheric air conditioner and draws the shades so getting out of bed is akin to having your cervix scraped for medical reasons – you know you should do it, but it is wildly unpleasant so you end up putting it off.

Another thing that stinks about it is that you are ultimately living a meaningless lie for months at a time. One of the things I have always enjoyed about Summer, besides that pants become optional almost everywhere, is that you can be sitting around enjoying quality company and not-so-quality beverages and marvel that the sun is still glowing at 7pm. You can’t do that with Daylight Savings, because someone pushed the clock forward to make this happen. It’s like cheating on a test or creating fake profiles to comment nice things on your Insty selfies – you get the results you were after, but they have less substance than an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond (which, while I’m on a rant, why the shit is this show still on the air? Channel 11 should be Simpsons re-runs and nothing else). New South Wales is living a hollow, delusional existence.

But perhaps the worst thing about Daylight Savings is the changes in television scheduling. On the other side of the border, it had always been a nuisance – your zinger tweets would never feature on Q&A and you had to exercise constant vigilance if you wanted to confirm to Karl and Lisa that you do, indeed, wake up with Today. But last night, it was more than an irritating inconvenience – it was heartbreaking. Facebook and Snapchat were abuzz about Dumb and Dumber being aired on GO (apparently all my friends were staying in on a Saturday night, which does make me feel a little better about my lack of weekend plans), with the movie at the part when the pair is in Aspen, towards the pointy end of the film. I had been lying in bed when this was going on, so I leaded out of the covers to watch the dying minutes of the cinematic poetry of this pairing. But, alas, it had already wrapped up thanks to Daylight Savings. Instead, I was met with Yesman.

Expecting Dumb and Dumber and being faced with Yesman is like when I practically forced that work experience kid to watch Billy Madison only for him to report back that he liked I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry better – you have to summon all your power of restraint to not physically lash out and then implode into a ball of lost faith in humanity.

Sure, write this off as a trivial disgruntlement. Tell me that time is a mere illusion invented by the human mind. And that a second is just a word used so we can communicate a shared understanding of the concept of our elapsing existence and that I shouldn’t get so worked up about it. But years of sci-fi cartoons have taught us that tinkering with the fabric of time is dangerous and downright foolish, so with these New South Wales cowboys thinking they can play around with something as unifying as the way human measure their existence willy nilly, I am extremely unsettled.