Tech by PC

In the USA we just went though a time change. The majority of the world does not do daylight savings time, however some of us are still stuck on legacy systems.

The most common answer to why daylight savings time was used is that it was good for the farmers, however this answer is largly mythological in nature. Farmers will get up and work regardless of what time the clock on the wall says it is. Another answer is to save electricity. Factories used to use daylight to augment or replace lighting during the day, so if the factory works during daylight hours, it is then saving money.

These reasons are not valid reasons anymore, if they ever were.

If a job, like farming, depends on daylight hours, then it does not matter what time the person starts, that can be adjusted just for those people. Consider a factory – most are lit day and night now, and do not take advantage of solar lighting – it is much easier to adjust the schedule for a factory floor than it is for an entire country. The manufacturing areas where I work are lit by artificial lighting all the time, as are office areas. I walked into the office building this afternoon and sensors picked up my movement and turned lights on. I didn’t necessarily need the lights in the office area, but they came on anyway. If we worked in the middle of the night, the building would behave in the same way.

Here are some of the reasons I have against changing the time based on seasons:

• Causes accidents. This is a controversial topic, but some studies have shown an increase in accidents, especially in the spring when people lose an hour of sleep.
• Causes confusion. There is no controversy over this one. Confusion was amplified the last few years because dates were altered. Special patches had to be applied to computers and devices that dealt with dates in order to make them compliant. Some people will forget to change their clock and show up late or early for meetings. Some devices will switch at the wrong time or not at all which can cause confusion for months after a change. For example, say you have a recurring meeting in your organizer. It was set for 2pm every Wednesday. Now suddenly that even shows that you are meeting at 3pm. What happened? Is the event still 2pm, or was it changed to 3pm. Was the error on your software or on that of the originator. Half the people will show at 2 and the other half at 3. What happens if there is a double error and someone shows the meeting at 4pm? Or someone fixes the meeting to show at 2pm, then receives a call that the meeting was moved up an hour and now shows at 1pm. Confusing? You bet! What a waste of effort.
• Adds unnecessary complexity to software. See the complexity section above. Calendaring applications would be much more simple without having to translate times.
• Causes health problems. This one is also not very controversial. Studies have shown that the body clock can become disrupted for weeks due to the one hour change. Heart attack studies have shown that more heart attacks occur the three workdays immediately after setting the clock forward in the spring, and fewer immediately after setting the clock backward in the fall. There are also measurable changes in depression and suicide rates.
• Wastes money to inefficiency. This article would not even be necessary if we did not have it, so there is your first example. The confusion listed above causes great inefficiency. Sluggish people, circadian body clocks that have trouble syncing up, and missed meetings or work leading to reduced productivity are all examples.

My solution

Here is the part you have all been waiting for, right? The solution I have is different from most I’ve heard. I do not mind many of the solutions given such as moving to DST all the time or eliminating it altogether, but what I suggest is even simpler than that: GMT For Everyone.

That will never work, you say? Why not? It would work wonderfully. I normally go to bed around midnight, so I go to bed around 5am now. I normally wake up around 6:30, so now I wake up at 11:30. It is just a numerical representation of time anyway. Let businesses and unions choose what hours they want their employees to work, similar to what they do now. Computers and electronic devices would all have the same time no matter where they were or where they travelled. No more issues with that. People would get used to it in a matter of days and all of this mess would be behind us. Think of traveling. Would it not be easier to hear that your plane departs at 10am and arrives at 2pm and not have to do some kind of mathematical acrobatics in your head to figure out exactly how long that trip will be? Your business partner in California says he wants a meeting at 8pm and you don’t have to do any math to figure out when you need to call in. Yes, there still would be some consideration about what daylight or normal work hours were for the person setting up the meeting, but that’s one person who would have to figure that out, not every person on the receiving end of the meeting.

Well, as I mentioned, we are still on such legacy systems as empirical miles, british thermal units, and other such nonsense. Our measurement is based on some king’s body size. Why do we care about that? Well, we do, and just like our measurements we’ll be sticking to our convoluted time system because we like it that way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Fun, Tech Trivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.