by LonelyPilgrim on Sat Oct 24, 2009 3:52 am
For most of my life, up until 2006 I believe, my state - Indiana - did not observe Daylight Savings Time. This meant that for half the year, we were out of sync with all of our neighbours. Since I live 40 miles from the Michigan border, and both sets of my grandparents lived just the other side of the state line, you can imagine all the confusion that could ensue at planning family functions and understand why, around here, DST used to be referred to as 'Michigan Time'.
On top of that confusion, Indiana is geographically in the Central Time Zone, but due to long established political realities our fine state has observed Eastern Standard, and now Eastern Daylight, Time. Well, all except for the western counties which *have* observed Central Time, but every few years exactly which counties the line is drawn through has been changed by the state government. At the moment, it's about 20 miles west of where I live.
And so, up until a few years ago, it was possible, at certain times of the year for my home to be one hour behind Michigan and for my place of employment (at that time) to be two hours behind Michigan. Again, much of my family lived in Michigan, and so I would have to go around keeping track of three different times in order to know what time it was in areas that were never more than 50 miles apart from each other.
That long anecdote is by way of explaining my visceral hatred of time zones. Even the US military, on this side of the world, does just fine scheduling everything by GMT. I really wish everyone could do the same. At the very least, contiguous territories of small to moderate size - such as the UK - should not have a time zone split. It would simply lead to confusion and lost revenues by creating two hours a day in which it would not be possible to conduct business across the time zone demarcation. In dealing with other countries, such a reality is unavoidable, but why would the Scottish and English economies, which presumably co-exist in a very close arrangement, consent to making co-ordination more difficult and decreasing the number of hours per day during which orders can be placed and processed same day and the whole other host of business communication that requires two companies to be open and staffed concurrently for efficient operation?
Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. --Giacomo Casanova