It’s daylight savings time! Cue grumbling about how much it sucks.
Given: The abrupt shift of an entire hour is discombobulating and stressful.
Given: We would still like to shift our schedules to have more daylight in certain parts of the workday.
Given: An increasing percentage of our timekeeping devices have enough smarts to keep track of the time of year, and apply daylight savings without human intervention.
Thus, a modest proposal:
Why don’t we spread that hour-long shift out over a month or two? Every day in September and October, we lose a minute – the clocks leap directly from 12:59 to 1:01. Every day in February and March we gain a minute, with the clocks going from 12:59 to 12:60 to 1:00. Maybe we could even add in a little more now and then to get rid of leap years. Or at least leap seconds.
Shifting every day like this would be incredibly onerous in the era of mechanical timekeeping devices you can only change in one direction. But this is the digital age. Mechanical clocks and watches are increasingly becoming an expensive bauble that denotes prestige. Hordes of people don’t even wear a watch, preferring instead to rely on their smartphone to tell them what time it is.
The obvious problems: luddites who still vastly prefer mechanical clocks, and the need for a Y2K-sized effort to change all timekeeping software.
I am not sure if I am joking, or if I am entirely serious here. I know I’m not stoned yet this morning. Let me work on that while I go change the clocks on the stove and microwave.
I can see maybe setting it up in 15 minute shifts over the course of a month, but much more than that might actually cause more problems than it solves.
It occurs to me, contemplating it, that it wouldn’t be that hard to have mechanical clocks that basically just have the day be 1 [interval] longer or shorter than it ought to be, to shift over time, and the Daylight Saving shift is to switch it from increasing mode to decreasing mode.
But that only works if the two modes cover the same number of days each, I think… So yeah, no, organic cycles are much with the awkward :/
-E-
An even better idea: ABOLISH DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME. It doesn’t actually do anything useful. The few controlled studies on its efficacy of energy conservation have found that it actually is WORSE for energy consumption. Why are we still doing this practice?
The crazy thing is we only even started it because of this weird telephone game in which a satirical essay by Benjamin Franklin eventually got taken as gospel by some crackpot, and it didn’t make things any worse.
Yeah, I’m more for that to be honest. It’s another weird thing the US sticks to, like our insistence that moving to metric would be “too hard”.
Please, no! Time and time zones and calendars and leap years and leap seconds and just anything to do with timekeeping is just too complex already. And you know that if we did this some countries would adopt it and some would not (or worse, it’d be adopted or not on a state by state basis). “Let’s schedule the meeting for 4.” “Wait, is ahead by two hours thirty four minutes or just three hours or…?”
It wouldn’t matter if you told me it was a joke, my reaction would still be a visceral, “Nooooooo!!!!”
For pete’s sake, there were still countries adopting the Gregorian calendar as late as 1923, and there are still some which have not done so more than 400 years on…
(Yeah, I take this stuff *way* too seriously…)