How does the switch between dst and standard time disrupt your life?
Hardly at all, now that I'm retired. I just had to change a half dozen clocks, which took maybe fifteen minutes. It used to be a bigger problem when I had a work schedule with a carpool so I couldn't easily adjust my comings and goings. Now I just wake up when I wake up and go out when I go out. It may be more of a problem in the future when I get to the point where changing the clock on the VCR, or whatever device replaces it in the future, becomes difficult. I imagine the time change is hard on old people. I'd ask my ninety year old father but he lives in Arizona so he doesn't have to deal with it. Smart folks there in Arizona. I haven't changed the clock in my car yet because each time I do I have to get out the manual because I don't remember how to do it. Hint of things to come. First the car, then the VCR, then the watch, which isn't easy for old arthritic fingers. Actually, I didn't even know the time change was due the other day. I only realized it when I turned on my computer and it announced that it had changed my computer clock.
I'm sure that's much more than you ever wanted to know about me. Asking about my disruption probably wasn't even a real question.
But it leads to my point which I will try one more time to make. My twenty minutes and everyone else's twenty minutes, more for people who have more complicated lives than I, add up. We used to focus a lot on productivity and the GNP. This thing puts a dent in productivity, not in the class with the whole northeast going dark with a power failure, but it's still a dent. My point is that it is a totally avoidable dent, best I can tell. Why would we do that to ourselves? You know, it's not just lost productivity in this country, because people around the world that do business with us have to make an adjustment, too. The total cost is anybody's guess.
Parents don't want their kids waiting for a bus or walking to school in the dark.
Well, of course they don't. I don't want them doing that, either. I'm happy to give up my forty minutes a year so they don't have to do that. I would do it without a murmur if it made any sense to solve that problem that way.
Imagine if you will that we never had daylight saving time. No one had ever thought of it before. Now imagine that people start calling attention to the problem of kids walking to school in the dark. It becomes a national issue. SI threads are full of talk about it. What to do, what to do. Do you really think anyone would suggest that everyone in the country change their clocks twice a year? Congress does some nutty things but that would be considered ridiculous. What would happen is that communities would adjust their school hours appropriately. Duh.
I think I must be looking like some kind of ogre here, and a selfish one, to boot, but I'm really just a retired systems analyst who used to fix things like this, and practices like this still get my adrenaline flowing. |
