Time change mostly an annoyance

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, February 23, 2007

Because I seldom watch television, I am almost completely out of the loop on certain pop culture phenomena. Can’t name any of the actors on Gray’s Anatomy. Missed Prince’s allegedly lewd antics on the Super Bowl half-time show.

Seldom do these things affect my life (or anyone else’s, for that matter).

But once in awhile, I catch some snippet of telenews (not the same as actual news) at the gym or from the kids’ audiovisual altar down in what we like to call the “garden level” of our house. In one of those glimpses, I got the idea that this year’s early advent of Daylight Saving Time is going to be a “Situation.”

Should have known better. Turns out the “problem” is that some people might have to manually re-set the clocks on their computers, cell phones, etc.

Hyping that into a crisis is almost as annoying as the non-event of Y2K. I’m still a bit miffed that I had to spend that New Year’s eve writing a story about something that didn’t happen.

Anyway.... The non-crisis of an early Daylight Saving Time got me thinking about whether we, as a nation, are really going to gain anything from beginning Daylight Saving Time three weeks early, on March 11.

Yes, I know that it is supposed to be an energy-saver. More people are up at night than in the morning, so by artificially juggling the day so that the sun rises later and sets later, we’ll use less electricity. In theory. Far as I can tell, no one has ever proven that it really makes a difference.

Indeed, that’s the problem with the whole Daylight Saving Time thing: It messes with people’s schedules without producing any clear or significant benefit. If it’s so great, after all, why don’t we spring forward two hours? Or why do we ever go back to Standard Time in the fall? Why not just make Daylight Saving Time permanent?

Some of my bias may come from being a morning person. Left to my own devices, I’d be asleep by about 8 p.m., and up not long after 4 a.m. It would be wonderful to have sunlight that early in the summer. And, in fact, we would have that if not for Daylight Saving Time, which pushes sunrise back an hour.

In any case, the trend is likely to continue, as recent decades have brought Daylight Saving Time to an earlier and earlier start. President Ronald Reagan moved it up from the end of April to the beginning, and now President Bush has moved it ahead another three weeks (plus added a week in the fall).

In another 20 years, looking for another way to seem to be doing something about energy shortages, we can probably expect some president to bump Daylight Saving all the way into February so that here in the north we can continue driving to work in the dark for an extra few weeks.

But, hey, just think of all the fun times out in the back yard in the sunlight and 20-degree February temperatures.

OK, it may not really hurt anything to move Daylight Saving Time around. But the bottom line is it just does not seem right. Let’s make a plan and stick to it, even if it’s a bad plan for Daylight Saving to begin in March.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.