(Kidding. It really was gorgeous, wasn’t it?)
I woke up around 8:00 (really 9:00) this morning and thought, eh, I’ve got another hour to sleep before I’ve gotta get up, do laundry, and go to work. I’ll be fine. Mmmm, pillow.
9:00 rolls around, I dump my laundry in the washer and putz around a bit. Idly deciding to fire up the computer…
It’s really nearly 10:30–and I’m due at work in fifteen minutes.
:eek:
Fortunately my boss understood, but that was a serious ice-bucket-down-your-spine moment.
Bah. If that were true, what would justify the Congress and President of the United States passing and signing a law EXTENDING it by starting it earlier and ending it later? What, don’t you think they know what they’re doing?
Frankly, I wouldn’t have been so understanding. This is why the change happens on Saturday, and talked about in pretty much every media outlet on Friday (before it happens) and Saturday (after it happens), be in on TV, radio or printed news. Not to mention this very board, which you are obviously a participant on.
I may forget to reset my watch but the very first clock I reset is my bedside alarm clock, when I go to bed on Friday night.
Seriously – how did you go by an entire day without realizing you were off by an hour from everybody else?
This used to be because TPTB didn’t seem to grasp that GMT is a constant, and would change the definition of GMT on the server, instead of telling the server “the timestamp of the Chicago region is now GMT-5 rather than GMT-6”.
Why the hell isn’t this a pit thread? Damn it! This thing ought to coincide with a Monday holiday so we have time to adjust. As it is here I am at work way to early and today feels particularly Monday today. Uuuggggggggghhhhhhh.
One year, a guy I used know had his birthday on the Sunday after the switch - OK, on the day, but you know what I mean.
Now, this guy told us regulars that he was going to be in the pub from the minute it opened at noon right until it closed at 2pm (UK pubs used to do that), and that if anyone wanted to buy him a beer in celebration, he’d gladly accept. Since we regularly went to the pub on Sunday lunchtime anyway, and buying someone a beer on their birthday was a normal tradition, this seemed unnecessary and greedy, but he was an odd character.
Anyway, on the day in question, we assembled as usual about 12, but this guy didn’t turn up. As 1pm approached, it became clear to us that he’d not realised about the clocks changing … but we were wrong. By the time he’d turned up on the dot at 2am - too late to get a drink - we’d figured it out, this time correctly.
He’d remembered that the clocks changed, all right. He’d just got the direction of change wrong.
Amen. I HATE switching back in the Fall. I enjoy having an extra hour of daylight so when I come home from work I can actually DO things outside without having to have a flashlight stuck to my head.
I scurried around on Sunday afternoon, setting all the clocks in the house ahead. I still have to change the clock in my truck and the water softener. Later, I sat down to watch TV, and the stuff I wanted to see wasn’t on til an hour later. My dog was puzzled, but not complaining, at being fed early.
I read somewhere (…cite?..) that one analysis of the net effect of DST for one particular city or area was an INCREASE in energy consumption.
I’ll do a Googling to see if this is some kind of Urban Legend in the making, but this was the gist.
The whole point is to have an extra hour of daylight after work when people are active, as opposed to before most people get up out of bed. For example, last Friday (before the change), the sun rose at 6AM and set at 6PM (approximately); after “springing forward”, the sun rises at 7AM, and sets at 7PM. Looking forward to mid-summer in NYC, instead of the sun rising on July 1st at 4:30am and setting at 7:30pm, EST, it’s rising at 5:30am and setting at 8:30pm EDT (as logged here).
This was great back when Daylight Savings was first proposed, as the main energy cost was in lighting (be it candles saved or watts for electric lights). However, in the modern age, a side effect of increasing the overlap between “hours of sunlight” and “hours of human activity” during the summer is to increase the amount of air conditioning needed", especially in expensive-to-cool environments like office buildings with people packed together, and using computers and printers and other high-heat equipment.
I was tired and I had a crappy week, and I ended up being only ten minutes late, and I spent about two hours in the morning without realizing I was off by an hour from everyone else. Okay?
DST is an interesting phenomenon as we consider what to do about global warming. DST does not add or subtract a single second of daylight from a 24-hour period - it just changes our social construct of a standard working day. It may save money and energy spent on lighting, but so would getting up at sunrise and going to bed at sunset. Our society can’t handle that one, so we tell ourselves the lie that noon is actually 1PM. Do you know anyone that keeps a clock 10 minutes fast to keep themselves punctual? This is the same trick, only it’s an hour fast instead of ten minutes.
So, would we, as a society, save that money and energy without the imposition of DST through the heavy hand of legislation? I doubt it. And if we won’t even save ourselves $10 a month by getting up early and going to bed early, what hope do we have of eliminating the burning of fossil fuels without some serious boot-to-the-head legislation?
At least the people in Saskatchewan, Arizona and a few other pockets around the world get to seasonally adjust a few minutes a day. And can we really call it ‘Standard’ time when we’re spending more than half the year seasonally adjusted? A pox on it, I say! Faugh! to your modern technology. And with that, I’m off to the tub…
It really was gorgeous, wasn’t it?)