March 7, 2007--Daylight Losing Time

Feeling emotionally overloaded by the Scooter Libby verdict, and what it says about how the Bush administration operates, and even more so by continuing to feel frankly rage about the way our administration hypocritically panders to the American public about our soldier heroes while at the same time undermining the VA and the way wounded troops and their families are treated, I thought I would distract myself, and perhaps you, by turing to a lighter subject—daylight savings time. My favorite day of the year when we move clocks ahead one hour to give us more daylight during the evening.

This year, by congressional action, DST will begin three weeks earlier than in the past and extend one week later in the fall in order to, as the chief sponsor of the bill said, give kids an extra hour of light on Halloween night for Trick-Or-Treating.

I was feeling good about this, though I’m now more into the treating than the tricking, until I read about some of the unintended consequences in the business section of the NY Times (article linked below).

It appears that though the kids may be happy on October 31st, many businesses are facing what may turn out to be a mini-Y2K. Remember the maxi-Y2K? When the year 2000 was approaching corporations spent literally billions on manually reprogramming computers whose internal, automatic clocks were not programmed to recognize dates from 2000 and beyond. There was concern that international financial institutions, as one example, would crash to a halt unless their computers were adjusted. Others were concerned that airplanes that took off during the evening of December 31, 1999 would disappear from radar screens at the stroke of midnight. While millions was jumping up and down in Times Square who knows what might happen in the skies above.

No one is predicting that similar things will occur during our extended DST, but it is going to cost companies upwards of half a billion dollars to change their computers. If they don’t, programmed stock trading will not work properly, just-in-time manufacturing schedules will be disrupted, and even unadjusted automated hotel wake-up calls will mess up guests’ travel schedules.

And there is another consequence—since the establishment of the Greenwich Mean Time system in the 1850s, the structuring of the world’s time zones, and the creation of Daylight Savings Time after the First World War, all of which over time became something of a global phenomenon if you forget that China which should have five time zones has chosen to have just one or that Arizona and Puerto Rico do not participate in DST, changes in any aspect of this worldwide system have occurred through international negotiations. That is, until two years ago when the Republican-controlled Congress (sorry, but this is not just about Halloween) acted preemptively and made these changes in DST without consulting any other countries, including those that are members of the Coalition of the Willing.

So this means that for our four extra weeks of DST certain aspects of doing business and other forms of international relations will be disrupted. As you might imagine, this too is not helping us win friends around the world who see this unilateral change as another example of American arrogance.

But maybe they'd feel better about this if their kids would get with Halloween.