Bob Sullivan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My, my! Most people here find Daylight Savings Time delghtful. Few
> people can make good use of the extra hour of daylight before work.
My personal objection has more to do with calling it "Saving Time"
when it a) doesn't _save_ anything, and b) has as its main purpose
increased _spending_. The nomenclature actually bothers me more
than the change back and forth or what time we set the clocks to,
though I must say that as a bit of a night owl I've got enough
trouble getting up in the mornings as it is (so while I might not
have gotten "good use" out of an extra hour before work when I was
employed full-time, having extra time between sunup and when I had
to get out the door would have made it a lot easier for me to get
to work when I was expected to be there.)
> Many people find good outdoor activities for the extra hour after
> work. Lawn and garden care come to mind first, then other
> recreational activities - kids' baseball, soccer, swimming,...
Which ties right back into the reason I call it "Daylight Spending
Time": the golf industry lobbied for it, saying that it would
account for huge increases in revenue from greens fees and sales
of golf clubs; the oil industry knows that people will be driving
to more places in the evenings if they have an extra hour of daylight
after work; and the retail industry likes it because even more than
gerdening and Little League, folks use the extra time to go shopping.
Note, by the way, that one group that tends to oppose DST is farmers.
An extra hour of daylight in the evening _is_ nice; I'll grant that.
But so would an extra hour in the morning be, from my point of view,
so I see it as merely exchanging two times of more or less equal
value instead of "saving" any daylight. The sun's still up the same
number of hours regardless of when we set the clocks to ... and I
remember thinking it was strange and wrong to be catching the school
bus before sunup so much of the time when I was in middle school and
high school.
The change back and forth, though I perceive it as a relatively minor
deal thanks to having been accustomed to it for so long, nonetheless
does have consequences. Traffic accidents tend to increase dramatically
for about a week after the spring time change, for example. And there
is the nuisance of trying to remember which of my VCRs make the change
automagically and which do not, when programming them to record something
on the other side of a time changes from when I'm thinking about it.
Personally, I'd rather keep the clocks the same year 'round, and just
adjust _schedules_ as appropriate for the season! If an office can
actually save money by having people start and end their workdays
earlier in the summer, or if doing so pleases most of their employees
and boosts morale, let them switch to summer hours; if another business
does better staying open late, let them simply do so. Why must we all
be in lockstep all the time anyhow? As long as we can agree on what
time it _is_, and can thus manage to make our appointments on time,
what is so magical about the hour we have arbitrarily labelled "nine
o'clock in the morning"? Sure, it's important to have some clue when
other businesses you interact with will be open, but we already have
to look that up on the web or on a refrigerator magnet or call and
ask, because some entities we interact with are in a different time
zone, and some keep "banker's hours", or "standard office hours", or
"customer friendly hours", or typical shopping-mall hours (which already
have a seasonal change around Christmas!), or typical grocery-store hours,
or 24/6 hours or 24/7 hours, or "drive-up window open until 1AM" hours.
I don't think what I'm suggesting would really make things any worse.
Movie production crews and farmers aren't going to change their schedules
just because the clocks say a different number than they did last week at
the same time -- if the call is for an hour before dawn so that shooting
can take advantage of as much daylight as possible, it doesn't matter
whether dawn is _labelled_ 5AM or 6AM. Recreational facilities are going
to stay open later in the summer because the days are longer, regardless
of whether the clocks have changed to "encourage" them to do so. And most
parks around here have had signs posted that give the hours as "sunup to
sundown" for as long as I can remember, meaning that their hours change
on a day-to-day basis, not twice a year -- for what they are, that just
makes sense.
In businesses that offer flextime, things are even easier: if you like
extra daylight after work, just come in earlier; if you'd rather eat
your breakfast in sunlight, come in at the regular time.
But despite my claim to usually consider Daylight Spending Time only a
minor annoyance, I'm a bit put out by this _change_ to the Daylight
Spending Time _schedule_. So I'm thinking about it more than usual,
and a lot of these little things are right there at the front of my
mind today for the kvetching. It's bugging me more than it usually
does, because my attention has been drawn to it by this new layer of
inconvenience tacked on. Thus the preceeding five paragraphs worth of
commentary.
And after talking about time this way, I cannot resist tossing in a
quote from a Harlan Ellison story:
"Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman.
"Get stuffed!" the Harlequin replied, sneering.
"You've been late a total of sixty-three years, five months,
three weeks, two days, twelve hours, forty-one minutes, fifty-nine
seconds, point oh three six one one one microseconds. You've used up
everything you can, and more. I'm going to turn you off."
"Scare someone else. I'd rather be dead than live in a dumb world
with a bogey man like you."
-- Glenn
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