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Daylight Saving Time officially apologizes for making 2020 longer

Or least one of its ministers does. Even one extra hour is too long for this hellish year.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
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Getty Images/Carol Yepes

Ready for 2020, with its coronavirus pandemic, murder hornets and  ice-resurfacer fires to be over? Sorry, it's going to seem to last one hour longer than most years, thanks to Daylight Saving Time, which ends on Nov. 1 with clocks rolling back one hour. But at least one person is apologizing for that appearance of an additional 60 minutes of this awful year. Not an American official, but still, it's someone.

Norway's Minister of Trade and Industry, Iselin Nybo, who's responsible for implementing the time change there, told the Norwegian News Industry she's sorry to do this to us.

"As minister of time, I strongly regret that 2020 will be another hour longer," Nybo said, as translated by urban-legends site Snopes.com on Tuesday. "This has already been a very demanding year for many."

Yes, technically it's not an hour longer, because we are simply getting back the hour we rolled away back in the spring. But Nybo's apology is just one more reminder that we can't put this year behind us quickly enough.

Daylight Saving Time had become more controversial even before the pandemic and murder hornets turned 2020 into a nightmare year. The concept was introduced to save energy, according to CNN, but some scientists now say the harm of adjusting to a new time outweighs that benefit. While 32 states want to make daylight saving time permanent and stop the changing of the clocks, it'll take congressional approval for that to happen. President Donald Trump is in favor of eliminating the change.