Franke: Daylight Saving Folly
by Mark Frank
“Time is the only scarce commodity.” I heard this on a Viking commercial from company chairman Torstein Hagen. His point, I assume, is don’t put off things you have always wanted to do. Since Viking’s clientele is largely aging retirees, his advice is certainly well given.
The problem with time is that it doesn’t move at the same speed for everyone, nor at a constant pace during a person’s lifetime.
When I was quite young, time moved unbelievably slowly. This was especially true in the weeks leading to my birthday. I worried the much-anticipated day would never come.
It didn’t get any better once I entered grammar school. Weekends seemed a long way off and vacation breaks just wouldn’t get here.
This didn’t change during my early work life. Each week there was a psychological countdown toward Friday afternoon. The oddity of it all was that once Friday afternoon arrived, time speeded up and there we were at Sunday night already with another work week in the offing. I hope a scientist can prove mathematically some day that time does move more slowly during the work week than it does during the weekend.
As retirement age approached, it wasn’t the weekend that captured our focus but that magic day growing ever closer. More than one coworker could tell me the exact number of months, weeks and days until they could walk out for the last time. You can imagine how time slowed to an imperceptible crawl while we awaited that magic day.
The paradox was that we got what we wished for. Time sped up and suddenly we found ourselves in our 60s. We no longer were impatiently waiting for our next birthday but somewhat dreading the thought of another one. That was the paradox; time moved both more slowly and more rapidly as we approached 65.
But once time speeds up, it won’t slow down again. You may think that retirement is a week with six Saturdays, but the real Saturday comes much too fast. Another week gone by with so much left undone.
It just doesn’t make sense that time won’t advance uniformly. Isn’t there an atomic clock in a mountain in Colorado that is tracking this to the micro-second? It is either not working correctly or I am just not paying attention.
This musing on the passage of time was triggered by an annual event that will hit us on March 8. Yes, Daylight Saving Time is just around the corner. And it’s not just about losing one hour of sleep during the night of March 7/8.
Every year this time, people realize it is happening again and start the anti-DST howling. Politicians continually promise to fix it, and well they should as they were the ones who created this mess. But nothing happens.
I have lived in northeast Indiana all my life so I should be used to regular time changes. During my childhood Indiana was on central time with no daylight savings adjustments. This made sense as the central time zone aligns with the sun’s movement across Indiana. Then Congress moved us to the eastern time zone but allowed us to avoid the daylight saving nonsense. Eventually the state legislature succumbed to pressure and adopted DST. Just when Congress did something semi-sensible, the Indiana General Assembly stepped in to create diurnal chaos.
I have been in three different time zones during my life. What was noon in my childhood became 1 p.m. in my early adulthood and now is 2 p.m. in my dotage.
Things had to have been even worse for the northwest and southwest parts of the state. They must have felt like the proverbial can being kicked down the road for the amusement of the time zone gods. Except these pesky gods don’t live on Mount Olympus; their residence is in Indianapolis or Washington D.C.
Whatever the arguments used to be, mostly related to commerce and educational improvements, things didn’t work as planned. Commerce has become 24×7 and school test scores have not improved. I guess the dairy cows no longer matter in Indiana’s political calculus but they can’t be happy either. Their milkers surely are not.
If things aren’t confusing enough, I read recently that earth is spinning faster these days. This past summer our 24-hour day was shortened by as much as 1.66 milliseconds.
Extrapolation of this datum is unreliable at best and therefore hardly helpful, but I can’t resist looking for how this affects me personally. If this rate were applied retroactively across my lifetime, I have lost about 45 seconds.
No wonder I am so far behind on everything.
I will work on reclaiming those 45 seconds while the politicians can direct their attention to stopping the daylight saving farce. Those 60 minutes matter much more than my 45 seconds.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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