Singpolyma

Archive for January, 2010

Archive for January, 2010

Not Doing DST

Posted on

I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to cross the 73rd day of this year, change my clocks ahead one hour, and give myself an artificial mini-jetlag on purpose. Nor am I going to just sit around and wish that someone would finally give the axe to DST. I am going to axe it myself.

You see, DST is really a shift in timezone. In Ontario, where I live, we are normally on EST, UTC-5. Then, 8% of the way through the second Sunday in March, everyone jumps ahead 41 millidays to EDT, UTC-4. Time in EST doesn’t change, but the people of the region choose to live as though they are in a different timezone.

Well, I deal with people from other timezones all the time. On the Internet I communicate with people from Africa, India, the UK, California, and more. When I talk about the time I either convert to their timezone, or qualify my statement (“6 my time” or “6 EST”). When they talk about the time, I convert to my local time before writing it down or adding it to my schedule.

So, for this summer twenty-ten, I will be living in a different timezone than many of those physically around me, but so what? I live in a different timezone than over half of the people I interact with anyway, but that’s never been a problem.

Would you consider also ditching DST? Of all the Calendar/Time reforms I’m a fan of, it seems the most popular. If enough people just stop respecting it, people will realise just how useless it is.