On a Saturday night in Indiana, Armageddon looms. “This is
like Y2K,” Purdue University information technology spokesman
Steve Tally said to Wired News, “except this one is really
happening.”
I, for one, am stocking up on canned goods. Because it is time
““ time for daylight-saving time, and there’s nothing
that Steve Tally or anyone else in Indiana can do about it.
I can only surmise that you “sprang forward,” losing
an entire hour out of your life at 2 a.m. Sunday like much of the
rest of the country. I can only imagine the horror that passed
through your brain Saturday night as you realized that your slumber
would be cut an hour shorter than usual. Perhaps, however, you
consider the biannual occurrence to be uneventful ““ a
meaningless bother that you have to remember twice a year. Spring
forward, fall back.
In Indiana, it is anything but uneventful. Indiana does not
spring forward or fall back. Most of the counties in Indiana have
not been practicing daylight-saving time since the early 1970s.
Some counties in Indiana are in the Central time zone, but most
are in the Eastern time zone, leaving those counties that operate
year-round on Eastern Standard Time to find themselves aligned in
the summer months with the Central time zone, which is observing
Central Daylight Time during those months ““ an hour
ahead.
Still following?
Five counties that were in the Eastern time zone, however,
unofficially observed daylight-saving time in order to stay aligned
with the nearby cities of Louisville and Cincinnati , and 11
counties refuse to keep track of time by any other method than a
sundial. OK, so I may have made that last point up. But everything
else is true.
It was a perfectly logical system as long as you had a map,
compass and calculator whenever you traveled through the state.
But last year, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels pushed through a law
mandating that Indiana finally begin observing daylight-saving time
in 2006. General dissatisfaction not seen in Indiana since, well,
ever, coursed through the streets.
Bar owners said that they’d start losing business from
patrons living in Eastern Daylight Time states flooding into
Indiana to try to get one more hour of drinking in before the last
call.
Movie theater owners said that they’d lose money since
there will be more sunlight in the evenings. Several counties tried
to defect to the Central time zone.
Tech workers like Tally said that computer software in Indiana
is not equipped to make the time switches necessary for
daylight-saving time.
The stream of Hoosiers flooding into Illinois to purchase
DST-equipped Microsoft Outlook technology makes me feel like a
Canadian who has swarms of elderly Americans fighting over my
prescription drugs.
All of this makes me wonder why we even bother to change the
clocks twice a year anyway. None of us are even sure why we do
it.
Many believe it is for the benefit of farmers, but evidently
farmers don’t actually like DST because, since they get up
with the sun anyway, all it means is that they have to get up an
hour earlier in the summer.
Actually, the main reason daylight-saving time is in practice
because it saves energy. According to the Department of
Transportation, the U.S. uses about 1 percent less energy per day
during the DST months, because there’s more light in the
evenings when more people tend to be home using electric and
electronic equipment.
Yet there’s also a downside to the time change. A
biologist at Kent State University, looking for effects of the time
change on people’s biological clocks, studied insurance
company records and found that the Monday after the “spring
forward” regularly has one of the highest accident rates of
the year.
A word of advice to those of you going to class this morning who
feel more groggy than usual: Do not blame the feeling on a week of
partying. Put the blame squarely at the feet of the amount of sleep
you got on Saturday night ““ one hour less than usual.
If daylight-saving time saves energy because more people are
using appliances during dark evenings than during dark mornings,
then why don’t we save everyone the biannual fuss and adopt
daylight-saving time year-round?
The California Legislature recommended just such a thing to
Congress in May 2001, but the request was never acted upon.
I hereby suggest that California follow Indiana’s example
and simply refuse to “fall back” at the end of autumn.
Those of you who are tired of losing an hour of sleep once every
spring, who are fearful of increased accidents or of missing a
class because you forgot to change your clocks, stand in protest
with me. California can become the one state in the union that will
be perpetually on daylight-saving time; the rest of the country can
jealously watch as we save our daylight.
We could even tauntingly throw a jar of saved daylight over the
border into Nevada occasionally. “Here, Nevada! You have it!
We have plenty more of it saved up!”
Perhaps one day the rest of the nation will join us. But come
October, at least in California, it would not be time ““ not
be time for standard time ““ and there’s nothing the
rest of the country could do about it.
A man can dream, can’t he?
If Atherton has not yet been
incinerated by a daylight-saving
time fireball from Indiana, e-mail
him at datherton@media.ucla.edu.
Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.