Well we made it into Daylight Saving Time (saving is singular, not plural) again. Personally, I’m happy about it. I like the longer daylight hours in the evening. Since I usually don’t have to urgently be anywhere early in the morning, the later sunrise doesn’t bother me. DST is just another indication of Spring to me. Of course a lot of people don’t like the practice of messing with time and there is more and more people speaking out against it. They don’t like being robbed of that hour of sleep and, probably legitimately, make the argument that the supposed “reasons” for it just don’t hold water. Daylight Saving Time started (at least on a large scale) in Germany during World War I. The reason was to reduce demand for lighting and save coal for the war effort. During World War II, the United States observed DST year-round for pretty much the same reason.
The whole idea that you gain or lose an hour actually doesn’t happen — only the government believes that you can cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket. I don’t think a lot of people have ever grasped exactly what we were doing or why we were doing it. Benjamin Franklin supposedly proposed DST as a means to save the number of candles burned, and even today, most people say we observe it as an energy savings initiative. However a number of studies dispute the energy savings. Last evening on the news, it was reported that heart attacks surge by 10 percent on the Monday and Tuesday after moving the clocks ahead an hour each spring.
Some people believe DST was adopted for farmers, giving them more daylight to work in the fields. The fact is that farmers were the only organized group to lobby against daylight saving in the history of the United States. Many/most farmers still don’t like DST, especially dairy farmers that find that cows’ natural milking schedules don’t adapt easily to a sudden shift.
Good or bad, for or against, DST generates some interesting stories every year.
To keep to their published timetables, trains cannot leave a station before the scheduled time. So, when the clocks fall back one hour in November, all Amtrak trains in the U.S. that are running on time stop at 2:00 am and wait one hour before resuming their journey. Overnight passengers are often surprised to find their train at a dead stop and their travel time an hour longer than expected. In the spring, it’s different — at the DST change, trains are instantaneously an hour behind schedule at 2:00 am, but they just keep going and do their best to make up the time.
My favorite DST story occurred in 1999. The West Bank was on daylight Saving Time while Israel had just switched back to standard time. West Bank terrorists prepared time bombs and smuggled them to their Israeli counterparts, who misunderstood the time on the bombs. As the bombs were being planted, they exploded — one hour too early — killing three terrorists instead of the intended victims, two busloads of people.
My theory when I was a member of the work force was to not futz around with Daylight Saving Time, just shorten the workday so I didn’t have to get up while it was still dark.
So the controversy will continue, DST or no DST. I still like it…. it lets poor people experience jet lag.
— 30 —