Daylight Stupid Time

Speaking Index

Delivered 1 May 2007

Project 2 in the Communication and Leadershop Program manual comes under the head Organize Your Speech. The goals are to choose an appropriate outline, make clear points, develop the transitions between sections, and create a strong opening and conclusion.

The fact that you've joined this group suggests you're of above-average intelligence, which suggests that you watch less television than average, but you still have to be aware that a lot of folks do a lot of stupid things in this country. I want to talk about one of the most stupid things, and the one that involves the most people. In fact, it's universal because it's required by law. Daylight Stupid Time.

Right now, my watch says it's 7:36 pm. That's the accurate local time, but it's an hour and eight minutes off. The eight minutes makes sense, the hour doesn't.

The earth turns, the sun appears to rise in the east, and when it reaches it's highest point it is noon, by definition. That's basic planetary geometry. Eight hours after this happens at Greenwich, England it happens at Selah, Washington, one third of the way around the world. Eight minutes later it happens here on Whidbey. Since 1883, mostly for the convenience of the railroads, all of us on the west coast use the same time. I can live with that.

In 1784, Benjamin Franklin was living at Paris. Despite being known for that "early to bed and early to rise" nonsense, he slept until noon and played chess into the wee hours of the morning. As a joke he suggested a set of laws requiring Parisiennes to get up several hours earlier than normal, rationing candles, imposing taxes on windows with shutters, and banning carriage traffic after sundown. It was a joke. It's still a joke. It was no more a serious idea than Jonathan Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their children.

Daylight Savings Time has no benefits, it has very real costs, and if you want to go to work earlier during the summer you should jolly well do it but there's no excuse to invoke the law to change my clocks.

Early in the last century, people were flocking to the cities to work in factories. Machines were powered by overhead belts and drive shafts, the work area was lit by acres of skylights in "sawtooth" roofs. They were all one-story buildings. Everybody started work at the same time, worked for ten hours or so, and then went home.

During the first world war, someone noticed they could eliminate electric lights in factories during part of the year by starting the work day an hour early. But instead of changing the work schedules, they changed the clocks. The war ended, and with it the stupid idea of changing the clocks.

Another war rolled around, and Franklin Roosevelt ordered the country onto War Time, advancing the clocks an hour and leaving it there year round for three and a half years. The war ended, and the country returned to its senses.

In 1973, claiming energy savings, Nixon signed a bill that reset our clocks for fifteen months at one stretch.

Let's see, Wilson, Roosevelt, Nixon, anybody else stupid enough to fall for this ruse? Sure, the Russians, with the least efficient and most corrupt of all the world's major economies! Not only do they set their clocks an hour ahead during the summer, that's on top of setting them ahead an hour the rest of the year!

There are 24 hours in every day. You get the same amount of light and heat from the sun every day, no matter what you set your clock to. The one thing that is most commonly argued for Daylight Stupid Time is the savings of energy, and there simply aren't any.

Remember those sawtooth roofs? That design was abandoned in the 'thirties. Abandoned by those with hundreds of thousands of square feet of factories, with tens of thousands of electric lights, and scores of engineers to figure out the costs. That skylights are no longer a critical factor in workplace design tells us one thing very clearly: As of seventy five years ago, the cost of lighting a workplace became irrelevant compared to the benefits of getting the best lights for the job.

So we have better workplace lighting. Does Daylight Savings Time affect the power consumption? Not one watt. Lights take the same energy no matter which hours they're turned on. All that matters is the length of time they're used.

Recent EPA studies show 6% of the power used in the US goes into computers and office equipment. Does Daylight Savings Time affect the power consumption? Not a bit. Some computers are turned on at the start of the day and off at the end, what matters is the length of that span. Most computers are turned on when they're installed, and turned off when they're obsolete.

It's not just computers, the whole world operates around the clock. If Daylight Time means an hour more daylight during the day shift, it means an hour less on the night shift. In other words, it means nothing at all.

Heating water is another big energy use. Does Daylight Savings Time affect the power consumption? Not at all. Well, there is the possibility that being forced to wake up an hour early is going to require an extra couple of minutes in the shower to wake up. But your shower and laundry patterns will vary with the season, not the time of day. You sweat more in the summer, and do more outside tasks, but that increased power consumption during Daylight Time can't be blamed on, or ameliorated by, changing the clocks.

So what about heating? Does Daylight Savings Time affect the power consumption? Not likely. On any given day, the sun beats down on your home or workplace with a certain amount of power. We have to make up the shortfall with artificial means, or get very clever about when we have doors and windows open. The same applies where power is needed to get rid of excess heat. Either way, the sun heats, or fails to heat, our homes with no regard to how our clocks are set.

In other words, the original concept was a joke. The current concept is a fraud. There are no benefits, but there are costs.

Many are sensitive to their circadian rhythm, suffering varying levels of disorientation, sleep deprivation, and loss of productivity when the time changes. Their spouses and co-workers have to listen to their complaints. I happen to be one of these. It's not traumatic, but it's very real for a couple of weeks after the change each time. Knowing that I'm going through this twice a year for absolutely no benefit at all makes it harder.

In a global economy, accurate time is critical for many things, some obvious and some surprising. One example: We track when files are uploaded to websites, when they were last changed, and what timestamps are on the files on the server, making it a trivial "one click" affair to make sure all the most recent files are online. But different computers report time in different ways, and rarely are programmed to look at what time settings might have been in effect for the last upload. Almost every file on almost every website ends up being reuploaded twice a year. If that were only five minutes twice a year and only one site in ten is actually being kept up to date, that's ten minutes per year times 5,000,000 websites or almost a million hours of somebody's time.

That's a lot, but nothing compared to the amount of time it takes to change all the clocks in the country. Most of that is unpaid, just time you didn't have for something more productive, and some staggering amount of time is spent changing clocks, timeclocks, and other devices in businesses.

This year, with the most recent dinking with the schedules, every computer in the US and Canada needed to be updated with the new rules. For most of them, this was automatic. But if you were running Windows NT or Windows 2000, you were on your own. It wasn't that hard, but it did take a few minutes on every machine - or you could have paid Microsoft $4,000 to send you the tools to automatically update all your computers.

Part of this year's change in the rules was to keep Daylight Time in effect until after Halloween, on the fantastic premise that more daylight would mean fewer accidents involving tricker treaters and cars. Excuse me? Halloween is a night-time event, you get in your costume and grab your collection bag and you go from door to door in the dark. That's the whole point. Kids are going to be out at the same time as always, but their parents' watches will say it's an hour later.

Some people like the change in the summer. Fine! I once had a client in Seattle that operated a single shift factory full of sewing machines. When Daylight Time started, they not only switched to it, but all the employees came in another hour earlier so they could get the best places at the beach when they got off work. It made sense to me, but they could have done exactly the same thing by simply moving their shift times up two hours and leaving the clocks alone.

Does that make too much sense? Who do you trust to set the daily rhythm of your life, you and your family and coworkers, or your congressman? If you say you trust your congressman more, I have two questions: What are you smoking? and Will you share?

Daylight Stupid Time is a concept that started as a joke, and actually had a period where it almost made sense. Now it's just a joke again.

Let's put an end to it. Let's leave our clocks alone and take responsibility for our own schedules.