FALL-ING back can come with a –ouch! – cost (Shutterstock).

I fall every fall. Or almost every fall. Spring, too.

As you probably know, this past weekend was the end of “daylight savings time,” and the beginning of “standard time.”

There are all sorts of reasons, or excuses for having to change clocks twice a year. They include providing more daylight for kids walking to school and saving electricity. But, let’s face it, any saving from daylight savings is more than wiped out by a society with two or three TV sets and three iPads in the house. And how many kids walk anywhere these days?

The change throws me off. In the fall, the night falls like a hammer at 5-ish, and it’s a jarring experience to leave the office – or shop or classroom and its bright lights and be plunged into darkness, as if you’ve traveled into some alternate universe.

But how else the change throws me off is more serious. At our house, we have more clocks than most people have furniture. As a journalist, deadlines are the life-blood of the predictable routine that keeps the news machine churning out the endless supply of sports results, movie reviews and traffic accidents we live by.

So that means that someone – loosely translated as “me” – has to go around changing clocks either forward or backward, depending on the time of the year. In keeping with business practice, all such devices are located up high on the walls to facilitate a quick glance while sitting down and hammering on a keyboard.

When the time comes, I have to climb up on ladders or desktops to pull the timepiece off the wall, spin the little wheel in the back forward or backward to accommodate the imaginary change in “time.” At my age, balancing on a narrow ladder step or arm-chair arm means chipping away at my life expectancy. 

Of course, some of the clocks are located above a giant, heavy piece of furniture that you couldn’t move without a regiment of NFL linemen. That means leaning precariously over at an angle of about 30 angle, holding onto a timepiece with one hand and wheeling the clock hands with the other, hoping that when we/I/you inevitably topple – sometimes – it’s on to something soft.

So let’s get rid of “daylight savings time” and replace it with something much more useful –“dad savings time” – in which middle age and older men are saved from the dread that accompanies “spring forward” or “falling” – literally – back.