So last night I decided I would stay up as late as possible. That's hard, since it's a Saturday and there's not nearly as much on YouTube to catch my attention as on a weekday. Eleven o'clock rolled around, and I started to drag. Not going to bed yet! So I went and changed the clocks, the alarm clock and three in the kitchen, since kitchen appliances think they all have to display the time. The computer and phone will take care of themselves. Okay! Now it's only ten PM, and I can stay up another hour. But no, my internal clock insisted it was sleep time. There's no way I could have made it to Saturday Night Live, which would be late anyway since I don't have cable TV. So I went to bed about 10:30 standard/11:30 EDT.
Woke up, looked at the clock, 2:50 AM. I haven't gotten up that early since I quit the bakery. I petted the cats and tried sleeping longer, but it was no use. I laid there awake for half an hour and then got up. Maybe in a week I'll be back to a regular schedule. I just know I'm going to fall asleep in church.
The thing is, I live alone and work from home. It shouldn't make much difference for me. But if it's this hard for me, I can imagine how much harder it is for people who have to follow work and school schedules. But what's the solution? If we stay on standard time all year, daylight starts at around 5 in the summer. If we stay on daylight time all year, the sun comes up after 8 in the winter (your mileage may vary; I live on the western end of a time zone). The schools picked up kids an hour before daylight last week, which is a whole other subject because there's no reason for kids to ride the bus for an hour when the schools are a 5- to 15-minute walk from here. But they shouldn't have to do it in the dark.
If I had to make the decision, we'd be on standard time all year. However, I am sure there are plenty of reasons to stay on DST all year that I'm not up on. Maybe we should go back to using DST for a shorter span of the year. I remember when it was April to October, but it has expanded to March to November. Studies show that making DST longer didn't save any more energy, because what we gained in evening sun was gobbled up by using lights in the morning.
So I've spent that "extra hour" we got back kvetching about it. How does the time change affect you, and what would your solution be?
6 comments:
Year-round Standard Time would be fine with me.
Getting kind of old having this discussion twice a year for years on end. It's called Standard Time for a reason and that's where we should be. But it won't change, at least not in my lifetime. Too many special interests combined with the change coming from an Act of Congress. Yeah, good luck with that.
A man once invented a clock that continually and gradually adjusted the time so that there were no abrupt changes for DST. I cannot find his name or the clock name now of course. Such a thing would be easy to accomplish with todays computer driven clocks but trying to get people, let alone countries, to accept such a thing would be impossible. Plus it would instantly render all existing clocks worthless. Still it is an interesting thought exercise.
@Anonymous, how would that clock go? Does it vary the length of a given area's second by latitude as well as by time of day, and do that continuously, all year around? Because I love that idea /almost/ as much as I like the idea of putting all the real clocks on real time (not so-called Daylight Saving Time), where the sun is highest in the sky at noon every day, the way it should be, like we all just did last night, and leaving them there forever.
...Except for the leap time periods. Here's something I read on Clifford Pickover's page; I don't remember who actually said it: "Instead of adding a leap second, we should be correcting the speed of the Earth's rotation. All this is just laziness." It is. We have the technology, the atomic bombs and so on; let's get to work.
We should just go with Standard Time. I mean really, changing the clocks twice a year? If they tried to bring that in now there would be rioting in the strets.
Here in Wisconsin, we went back to "Central Standard Time", and will remain on CST until March 13, 2022. This means that we are on 'REAL' time for a period of only four months, and on 'altered' time for eight months.
Don't know what the options are. Forget daylight savings time entirely, and accept that for two or three months of the year (Nov, Dec, Jan) it'll be black by roughly 6:00 PM, or make daylight savings time the "new standard time" and keep it in effect year-round, which means that you'll be driving to work or getting off to school in the early AM under the faint light of pre-dawn? And just for the record, I seem to recall one year when they DID try to keep daylight savings time in effect over the winter months, and kids were going off to school, waiting for the bus, etc. in the dark — but there was such a hue and outcry over that (while it may have been a valid concern, they played up the fear factor of kids being mowed down by people in cars who couldn't see them in the darkness or low-light conditions) that they never did it again.
So whichever way you go, there's going to be some inconvenience at one end of the day or the other. Which one do you want to deal with?
-"BB"-
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