Made-Up Town Refuses to Spend Its Extra Daylight Saving Hour, Locks It in a Vault Until February

Lower Puddleford, a village that exists only in this paragraph, announced Monday that it did not use the extra hour residents got when the clocks fell back this weekend and has instead locked it in a vault behind the public library.

"Everyone else just slept through theirs," said Deputy Timekeeper Harold Wickersham, a fictional man who has never once been late. "We looked at that hour and said, no, this one's going somewhere it'll be appreciated."

Under the plan, the hour will stay in storage through the holidays and be released on a gray Tuesday afternoon in late February, when the village estimates it will be worth roughly three times as much. Officials have not said which Tuesday, only that "you will feel it."

The vault itself is a former bank safe that once held the town's collection of commemorative spoons. The spoons have been moved to a shoebox. Wickersham said the hour is being kept at room temperature and checked twice a day, though he admitted nobody is entirely sure what it looks like.

Not every resident supports the decision. Delia Brandt, a made-up night-shift baker, said she was "already up anyway" and would like her share now, in cash if possible. A second resident, who asked to be identified only as "a man who reset his microwave clock and is not doing it again," called the whole project "a lot of fuss over sixty minutes."

The village has also opened a waiting list for residents who would like to donate their extra hour to the reserve. As of Monday morning, it held 11 hours, two of which were described by their donors as "mostly spent on the couch."

Wickersham said the town is studying whether it can save a second hour next year. "We're not greedy," he said. "We're just organized."