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Finding out what time it is never used to be difficult. But it's sure getting complicated now.
Daylight Savings Time, for instance, was fairly
straightforward. On the eve of the last Sunday in April,
you set your clock ahead one hour. Come the last Sunday in
October, you moved the hands back. There was a saying,
Spring forward, fall back.
But earlier this week, I ran into Ray James, the managing editor of the local newspaper, who asked me if I was aware that Daylight Savings Time came earlier this year, on the first Sunday in April.
No, I wasn't. And I'm still not sure whether he was telling the truth, or indulging in an April Fool's Day prank. There was a time when I could have found out on Sunday morning by calling the phone company, but they won't even give you the time of day for free any more.
Perhaps that confusion will be a thing of the past, though, if a proposal goes through to put all Colorado clocks an hour ahead of where they are now. The theory is that Denver's air pollution is worst during the short days of winter. But if people drive home an hour earlier, then there's more time for the sunshine to work at turning the carbon monoxide into something less toxic.
At first, I was angry about the suggestion. Why should my children have to walk to school in the dark during the winter, just so people in Denver don't choke on their own exhaust fumes?
Besides that, moving the clocks an hour forward year-round means that we'd be on Central Standard Time. Here we have mountains emblazoned on everything from souvenir ashtrays to license plates, and we're not even going to be on Mountain Standard Time?
Upon further reflection, though, I'm beginning to see some merit to the idea of abandoning Mountain Standard Time.
For one thing, there isn't such a thing as Mountain Time
if you watch television. There are always announcements
that a given program will air at 10 Eastern, 9 Central,
and 7 Pacific.
Apparently they don't care whether 12.5
million people know when their programs come on.
For another, getting rid of standard time would allow us to return to the traditional ways, where each community set its own time. A century ago, noon was not determined by the U.S. Department of Commerce, but by when the sun reached zenith where you lived. When it was noon in Denver, it was only 11:46 a.m. in Grand Junction, but 12:11 p.m. in Julesberg.
Such local times could also take local customs into
account. Some of us here joke that visitors would find it
easier to adjust if there were a sign at the city limits
which said Welcome to Salida. Please set your calendars
back 20 years.
I've lived in farming areas that ran on Dairy Standard Time. Everything from school hours to church services was scheduled around the morning and evening milkings. So why not go ahead and set the clocks by the demands of bovine udders? It makes as much sense as making dairy farmers organize their lives around the smog caused by metropolitan commuters.
Or we could adopt Resort Standard Time.
Each day would start at noon, since no one gets up before then, anyway. Time would proceed normally until 1:59 a.m., a minute before the bars are supposed to close. Then the clock would stop running, to resume on the following noon.
We could be even more flexible than that, I suppose. Colorado might go on Boulder Standard Time, which flows at rates determined by the current state of universal consciousness. Putting everyone on Company Time, where nobody is ever in any hurry, might be easier to adjust to, though.
The concept of having any sort of standard time originated with the transortation industry. So perhaps we should look there in our efforts to adjust our clocks, and go on Stapleton Standard Time.
As you've noticed if you've flown recently, under Stapleton Standard Time, clocks have absolutely no meaning. A posted departure time merely means that sometime in the following six hours, you will be allowed to board the plane, and at some indeterminate time after that, it will take off. Scheduled arrival times are similarly unrelated to temporal reality.
Forget Central Time or year-round Daylight Time. Put Denver on Stapleton Time, and the Brown Cloud will vanish. Rush hours will be just a bad memory, as you go to work whenever you feel like it, return home when you wish, and collect your full day's pay. If the airlines can do it, why can't we?
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