I would have to dispute Paul Gilmartin's assertion that "a majority
want to adjust their work hours to follow the sunrise". I don't have
a statistically-valid survey, but in discussing it with other people
through the years, I've encountered a few who really like DST. I think
most people just go with the flow, but a lot of people didn't like the
hasseles. I think that if the transition times were changed to Monday
AM from Sunday AM, so that businesses instead of churches suffered
the impacts of the change. there would be huge pressure to get rid of
it. Furthermore, in the Northern tier of states and Alaska, I found
myself in Winter going to work or coming from work ( or both) in the
dark, and in the light in the Summer, regardless of DST.
Further, a recent article in "Scientific American" raised serious
questions about the assertion of energy savings from DST, and pointed
out health issues associated with the time changes, and called DST "an
idea we can do without".
I no longer work in IT, even though I follow it, and I still despise
DST. In fact, we recently moved from Arizona, where we were free of
the annoyances of DST, to Washington State, where we have had to
adjust to it all over again. My Mac's have no problems with it and my
wife's Windoze can handle the changeover, but the 5 clocks and two
watches in my home have to have special attention twice a year. As I
mentioned in an earlier message, my daughter works in auditing in a
company which has many processes involving Windows-based processors
and instruments, and they recently discovered that time stamps on data
recorded during the DST period are displayed one hour off during the
non-DST part of the year. Microsoft apparently has no plans to correct
the issue.
As an aside, years ago, an operator who was functionally illiterate
was hired (don't ask why) for our MVS system . He was allowed to be on
duty alone (don't ask why) on the morning of the DST changeover. He
set the wrong Date/Time to a date in the future, whereupon, most of
our third-party software promptly decided we were out of license. When
the IPL failed, the systems staff were rousted out of bed and lost a
lot of sleep.
Dale Miller
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