With news spreading of the Silicon Valley Bank situation (And if you don’t know, that’s a deep rabbit hole. Have fun!), it got me thinking: banks take the money we deposit and invest in different things, thus earning money off our money until we make a withdrawal.

What if that’s what happens when the government forces us to “spring forward”? They take an hour away from us in the wee hours of the morning, but what do they do with it? Of the states that “honor” Daylight Savings, there are approximately 325 million people. That’s 325 million hours going into the federal government’s time bank, and it could potentially be more if it compounds depending on the number of clocks inside each household. I don’t know how that works. Time collection’s a funny business, more mysterious than the capricious algorithm of YouTube and Amazon.

“But wait!” you say. “They give the hour back to us in when we ‘fall back’ so what’s the big deal?” While that may be true at the moment, there are three questions you need to consider:

The first is, what are they doing with those hundreds of millions of hours in the months they possess them? Are they being given out to aging leaders of government and industry so they can live a little longer? Are they being used in some kind of temporally-fueled hyperbaric chamber so people can be rapidly healed of injuries? Are we paying tribute to some kind of cosmic horror, feeding it time so that it doesn’t devour our entire world?

If any of the above is true, the second question is: how are they able to give us back our time when we “fall back” if they’re spending it all? There are two possible solutions to this, each more absurd than the last: there’s got to be some kind of time bank or banks to invest the hours into, and then they’re paid interest that they then pay back to us. The other is that there’s some kind of time printer out there like the Fed, and time is actually a fiat currency of sorts.

Lastly, what happens if the time bank (or banks) end up like SVB or any other major bank that’s failed in the past. What if the government runs out of time to give back to us? What if all they do is continue to take and take and take?

Anyway, there’s your writing prompt! Have fun with it. As for me, it’s back to the day job and trying to figure out how I’m going to get everything done today that I need to get done, considering I just had an hour stolen from me. …And considering the fact that I just spent even more time writing this post…