Last Sunday, March 14, a friend called me from Boston. It was Pi Day. David happily reported that the local bakeries and pizza parlors were openly celebrating the occasion — something the two of us had started after math class 30 years ago as a kind of joke.
Our phone call, which we’d scheduled for 3:14 p.m., almost didn’t happen, though. The clocks had changed the night before in America, altering the time difference. Fortunately, David had thought to ask whether I observe daylight saving time (DST).
I wish I could say I never observed it, or that I could observe it without noticing it. It’s only one hour, but to me, it’s dark when it should be light, and it’s light when it should be dark.
I’m not the only one who thinks this. Animals respond to natural processes, not to clocks. My computer and radio-controlled watch handle the changeover (luckily), but my clocks, cameras, phones, VCR and body clock all demand to be reset twice each year.
A dark time
Timetables have to be changed, too. CNN’s program schedule for Europe and the Middle East was off by an hour, starting on Sunday, until someone saw it and fixed it two days later. But even then, half the Middle East uses DST and half does not.
Business hours no longer overlap, and the changeover dates aren’t uniform. If you’re dealing with the southern hemisphere — Australia, Chile, Namibia — it’s even worse. You can never be sure what time it is there.
Study after study shows that darker mornings or darker evenings lead to more traffic accidents. Time magazine reports that crime-ridden Guatemala stopped using DST “because the dark mornings created too many opportunities for foul play”.
Why do we do this? Why don’t we let nature take its course?
Wikipedia chalks the idea up to a New Zealander who wanted more evening hours in which to collect insects, and to an Englishman who liked to play golf in the evenings. Hooray for them. Daylight isn’t being “saved”, only shifted.
The Germans say they saved coal during World War I by setting their clocks ahead; and others make an argument having to do with the harvest. But neither situation is the natural state of mankind. Before we lived in an industrial or agrarian society, we were hunter-gatherers. We followed the animals when they came out at dusk or dawn. At noon, they’re hidden away somewhere, taking a nap. We should be, too.
Work to live!
Our work habits originated back when our great-grandparents worked 12 hours a day. They lived to work, rising and setting with the sun — or even before and after it. Unions negotiated some free time, but at the end of the day, when Great-grandpa was too tired to do much with it.
In our present post-industrial society, most of us spend our days at indoor workplaces while the sun shines outside. We even lower the blinds to filter it out of our offices. We then pay big bucks to take vacations in sunny places. If we worked a few hours earlier or later, we could be getting the sun for free.
We workers have to heat our homes and light them up, while companies are better able to save on these costs during the day. We also give our most productive hours to our employers. Why shouldn’t we keep them for ourselves or give them to our families instead?
Why should we play golf in the evening? Our game would be much better at 10 a.m. That Excel sheet doesn’t care whether it’s light or dark outside. It can be drawn up at the end of the day, when we’re half-awake.
Instead of resetting our clocks, we should think about resetting our work-life balance.
Read about the origin of Pi Day: Numbers are important, too
