Sally Breslin: My Life: MY CLOCKS DON'T WANT TO BE TOUCHED!

I recently read an article that said switching to daylight-savings time can affect the human body in negative ways – fatigue, stress, insomnia, even heart problems – especially during the first week or two, all because of the loss of an hour.

So I guess that’s one good thing about having to go through it during a pandemic. I don’t have a schedule to follow or anywhere to go, so no big deal – I’ll just sleep an hour later and protect myself from the potentially disastrous effects of losing that precious hour.

That is, all except for the stress part. Turning my clocks ahead always stresses me out because…well, I’m convinced that all of my clocks hate me. And forget about changing the batteries in my smoke detectors. I just can’t handle doing both tasks at the same time, as they recommend, not without needing a prescription for some heavy-duty tranquilizers.

The problem with my clocks is they are hung in hard-to-reach areas. Trying to get them back up on the nail, screw, hook, or whatever else I previously managed to sink into the walls to hook them on, takes the agility of an acrobat. And believe me, the last time any of my body parts came even close to being agile was about 50 years ago.

Also, ever since “the incident,” I have become even more tense about touching my clocks.

The disaster I’m referring to involved a big wall-clock in my hallway. When I took it down to adjust it to daylight-savings time, I had trouble hanging it up again. The back of the clock had this little hole in it that was supposed to go over the head of the nail, but trying to find that hole and line it up precisely with the nail, I soon learned, took someone with the skills of Houdini. I think I must have scraped off half the paint on the hallway wall, trying to get that clock back up there again.

When I finally did, I breathed a sigh of relief and backed away to see if the clock was straight. That was when, right before my eyes, it decided to take its own life and leap off the wall.

To this day, I’m still finding pieces of it in places like the furnace grate.

And the clock in my office is even worse. I’m beginning to think the wall has some kind of magnetic force in it that makes clocks lose a few minutes every hour. For some reason, every clock I hang in there soon becomes slow, despite new batteries.

That office wall now also has a stack of big plastic storage tubs leaning against it, so trying to reach the clock involves climbing on a chair and then stretching my body over all of the containers – either that, or unstacking them. But they are so heavy, just trying to lift them pretty much guarantees a case of multiple hernias.

Dealing with the clocks, however, is a breeze compared to trying to access my smoke detectors. When my house was built, it was electrically wired for nine detectors, all of which were installed. I’m certain the contractor who planned their locations was some sadistic, evil person who cackled maniacally while saying, “Yes! Put one up in the middle of the attic, even though there is no way to get to it! And put another one out in the highest peak of the garage, 10 feet up!”

When my husband and I first moved into the house, we naively thought that having electric smoke detectors, all wired together, meant no more dealing with batteries. We soon learned that every detector also contained a back-up battery in case of a power failure. And because all of the detectors were wired together, when one battery did its annoying “I’m about to drop dead” chirping, all of the other detectors chirped right along with it. So in order to find the culprit, we had to keep removing and replacing batteries until the chirping stopped…that is, except for the one in the attic.

The only access to my attic is a sliding panel in the ceiling in the bedroom closet…with no way to climb up into it other than using a really tall step-ladder and then hoisting your body up through the opening. The attic also has no floors, just beams. So lose your balance and step off a beam, and you’ll come through the ceiling and turn yourself into a chandelier.

The first year of living in my current house, if I opened the oven door and there was even one burnt spot on whatever I was cooking, the smoke detectors would blare as if the entire house were ablaze. But the other night, I burned a whole tray of cookies (I was on the phone at the time), and a cloud of smoke filled the kitchen.

Dead silence.

I pushed the test button on the nearest smoke detector and all of them blared in perfect unison.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines for over 45 years. She is the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor,” “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation" and “Inside the Blue Cube.” Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.