Artificial Cheese

This is a wonderful weekend. This weekend the clock in my car becomes correct again. No more disclaimers for my passengers, and no more embarassing explainations about my clock being an hour ahead. Today I can start saying the time with confidence and turn my embarassment towards more obvious matters. However I know that in six months I will be in the same predicament, springing ahead only to crave falling back once more.

Is it laziness? Absolutely. I act like I’m making a stand against Daylight Saving Time but at its core, its laziness. I just don’t feel breaking my fingers trying to change my car’s clock through its radio interface. Even with that interface, you’d think that the AM/FM toggle would also be the AM/PM toggle, or the preset numbers stand for actual numbers. No, you need to hold down the clock button, turn the dial to the left to pick “hours” or “minutes”, and use your third hand to repeatedly hammer away at the “scan” button to change the hours. Click it once to go forwards, 11 times to go backwards. Real smart.

But this entry isn’t about car radio clocks and their operational deficiencies. Its about arguing the pros and cons of Daylight Savings. I mentioned earlier that I don’t change my clock because of laziness, but that doesn’t mean that its all my fault. In fact, many of the greatest cultural and technological advancements have been sparked by laziness. This time, I’m using laziness to question the this concept that we’ve considered necessary for so long.

Lets go over the positives first. After all, nothing happens without reason. There must be some advantages to Daylight Saving time. It may not seem true at this point in the year, but daylight saving does exactly what its called. It gives us more daylight over the course of a year. Ingeniously, the idea of daylight saving has increased the amount of one resource that we seemingly have no control over, daylight. This means a healthier economy because people are more likely to go out and shop in the daytime. Also, more daytime means less energy use. It seems like a perfect idea.

Well, its not exactly perfect. Although the daylight gained throughout the year is a good thing, the confusion and inconvenience caused by two jarring time changes in the middle of the year is overwhelming. As a developer of an application with many scheduled tasks, scheduling anything between the hours of 1am and 2am, when the times jump, is a bit unpredictable. It won’t be recongized in the spring, and it will be recognized twice in the fall. Its just not natural.

The entire world recognizes that its not natural. Many countries with consistent day lengths don’t even bother with this practice. This causes even more confusion with communications between businesses and people between regions with different views on daylight savings.

There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight for daylight saving. Next year, the United States is going to start daylight savings a couple weeks earlier, and extend daylight savings for a few weeks. Its really no change from a day-to-day perspective, but it just proves that people aren’t willing to give up on the idea yet.