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.