March 20, 2010

DST

Being from Saskatchewan i never participated i the ritual of daylight savings time until I moved here. I still find it odd even though I'd been doing it now for 10 years or so.

It's even weirder now that the Americans have started playing around with the dates that the clocks change.

I don't really understand the point. You're just shifting clocks around, not really adding or subtracting actual daylight hours. Apparently the opposition to the move came from farmers in Saskatchewan, not sure why though.

The real reason at least as far as I can tell that Saskatchewan doesn't change it's clocks is that if they did, the two main cities would fall on different sides of the time zone line. As it stands Saskatchewan just simple jumps from one time zone while everyone else is on standard time, and another when everyone else is on daylight savings time.

All I know is that when I was in school is was great, because during DST I could call my parents at a more convenient time, as they were two hours behind meaning that even though I was up later it was still early enough to chat with them.

It was kinda of amusing one year when we went to Florida as the time change fell the weekend of our trip, the rest of my family was even more confused about the change than I was.

Still, I don't really understand it, but I guess it's one of those things. It does highlight the fact that time is really somewhat arbitrary often it matches poltiical boundaries regardless of whether it makes sense or not.

Given that Canadian (or was he considered Scottish?) Sir Stanford Fleming had such a role in standard time, I think it's a bit amusing that we have one of the world's few 30 minute time zones. But that's a whole other story.

2 comments:

XUP said...

I think the whole thing is crazy and we should stop doing it - especially now, as you say when we keep changing when we're actually doing the changing of the clocks. Flemming just standardized time zones, I don't think he was involved in the daylight savings thing. It's supposed to save energy or something I understand.

Owen Gray said...

I enjoy getting an extra hour of sleep in the fall. But it takes three weeks to adjust to that missed hour in the spring.