Did everyone remember to change their clocks? Do you have any idea why we do this twice a year? I sure don’t. It turns out that the reasons we are given for changing our clocks twice a year are all pretty much just big lies. So why do we keep doing it?
I don’t care if we permanently keep our clocks on “daylight savings time” or on “standard time”. I just want us to get rid of the insanity of changing our clocks twice a year. It costs money, it costs lives, and nobody likes doing it.
Dump it. Now.
12 Comments
Ho, hum. We really must be getting desperate for things to complain about.
I blogged about this in 2008, optimistically predicting that Barack Obama might do away with DST. That part of the blog was wrong, but the reasons given for this idiocy still stand undisputed.
http://www.ruralvotes.com/thebackforty/?p=541
I retired in 2010 and stopped changing my clock. If I want a ten o’clock appointment, I now make it for 11 o’clock. Everyone else is sleep deprived. I’m just doing my thing as normal on Standard Time.
I like that Arizona pays no attention to time changes.
Actually, Arizona is a total mess. The state doesn’t observe DST, but the Navaho nation, which takes up a big part of the state does. Just to make things even crazier, the Hopi nation, which is completely surrounded by the Navaho nation, does observe DST. You can go on and off DST several times without leaving the state.
Actually, Mountain Man, DST affects my work significantly. I work with airlines and airports and it causes no end of trouble when the time changes. Think about it — when clocks go back one hour in the fall, the same exact time happens twice in every location that observes DST. So if you have a flight that departs at 2:30am on that day, you have to figure out which 2:30am. Plus it makes other computations much more complicated.
If it weren’t so serious, I’d make a joke about that Malaysian airliner that vanished just after midnight. Maybe it is caught in a time warp caused by DST and will reappear this fall.
When I was a train dispatcher the time change was always a real pain in the arse. I’m with IK, one or the other (I prefer standard time, but wouldn’t get in an argument about which is best cause it’d be a waste of time), but quit the stupid change. It’s another idea that Congress had many years ago that is well past it’s time to be gone.
I play tennis after work. The extra daylight is very important to people that go outside
I was working part time on a night shift in the fall in a hospital which is a nine hour shift when the time changes. They would have been happy to pay me for the eight hours had I not complained.
Indiana made the switch to observing DST a few years ago. The argument was that it would save power because people wouldn’t need to use their lights at night. It didn’t because people ended up using their lights in the morning instead. None of the promised benefits happened. But the drawbacks, such as a small increase in morning traffic accidents–caused by later sunrises–did.
As for the argument that the extra daylight is needed for outside activities…hogwash. That argument only holds up if you’re playing tennis until 10 PM (which is when the sun sets in the middle of summer in Indiana). Hell, I even lived in Vermont (which is at the eastern end of the time zone and very far north), and it stayed light far later than was needed for outdoor activities. If you really want to play tennis until 10 PM or later, you can: There’s this recent invention called “electric lights.”
When I worked in NYC years ago, I had a similar problem with the switch. It was always entertaining.
They had a 1:20AM train, a 2:20AM train, a 3:50AM train, and a 5:20AM train. In the spring, when the clock goes forward, the smart thing to do would be to cancel the 2:20AM train and run the 1:20AM and 3:50AM. And sometimes they did. And sometimes they ran the 3:50AM train at 3:20AM. It was always a crap-shoot as to what was going to happen. In the spring, the smart thing to do would be to run 1:20AM train twice. So you’d have a 1:20AM train, another 1:20AM train, and a 2:20AM train. Nope. You’d show up for the 2:20AM train and discover that it was now a 3:50AM train.
That said, I love DST. I’m more of an evening person. As I told someone, once, which would you rather have–sunrise at 5:45 and sunset at 8:05 or sunrise at 4:45 and sunset at 7:05?
I’d like to vote for DST all the time. Personally I’d like to occasionally get home from work before it’s dark in the winter months. It’s so depressing leaving and coming home in the dark. Blaaaa
DST for me 🙂
I’m late to the conversation but I vote for a compromise. Keep the fall back every year but eliminate the Spring forward.