Mike says to spring forward

As my buddy Mike reminded me during a Skype chat: at 2AM on Sunday (that's a bit less than four hours from now for those of us in the DC-Metro area), clocks need to roll forward an hour. That means that I and Seoul will go from being 14 hours apart to being only 13 hours apart. 3PM on Tuesday in Virginia will be 4AM on Wednesday in Seoul, for example.

Modern guy that I am, I find Daylight Savings to be a quaint, outmoded concept. The original idea behind shifting the clock had to do with farming, if I'm not mistaken: farmers needed as many daylight hours as they could use to perform their tasks, especially during harvest time in the fall. With the advent of nighttime illumination and automated technology, however, much of the need for a clock-shift became irrelevant. What's more, many countries in the world (including South Korea) do just fine without shifting their clocks-- and these countries also have farmers. Is there really a need to continue this bootless custom? To me, it's more of a bother than anything else: far from saving time, it seems to waste it. My waking hour will come one hour earlier tomorrow; I never celebrate a curtailing of my sleep.

We'll talk another day about my plans to change the entire world to Global Standard Time.


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