Papirex
Apr 2, 2006, 4:53 PM
Post #11 of 31
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Re: [johanson] Daylight Saving Time starts Sunday AM
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Daylight savings makes a lot of sense. Especially for a business that must communicate and be in sync with other branches of the same business in a certain time span. It can be expensive to not be able to reach a department when you need to.
In 1983 I was working for a multi-national company. Our branch office was located in Anchorage, Alaska. We had a contract to do a large construction job in the state capital, Juneau. I was sent to live in Juneau for a couple of years to do the job.
At that time there were three time zones in Alaska. There should have been four, but Yukon Time was skipped. Alaska is a huge place, four time zones is the same number that all the lower 48 states have. Juneau should have been on Yukon time, but it was on Pacific Time, Anchorage was on Alaska Time. That was a two-hour difference.
The normal workday for construction if you are not working overtime in Alaska is from 7 AM to 3:30 PM with a 30-minute lunch break. Our office in Anchorage did not open until 8 AM Alaska time. If I needed to call the office to talk to one of the engineers, etc. I had to wait until 10 AM Pacific time. I had been working three hours by then. If our office needed to contact me, they had to call before I left the jobsite for the day at 1:30 PM their time. There was only a 3-½ hour window of time that I could be in touch with my home office each day.
On a large construction project there are many change orders, and changes to specifications. Failure to implement or co-ordinate any changes in a timely manner is expensive. It is critical that the engineering staff be able to communicate with the people in the field conveniently. No cell phones in those days.
In the late 1980s Alaska consolidated into basically one time zone, Alaska Time. Only a few of the far western Aleutian Islands remain on Aleutian time. If you think people bitch about changing time a couple of times a year, you should have heard what they had to say about changing to a different time zone permanently.
While the energy savings for an individual home or business may be small, collectively across an entire country the energy savings are huge. Less energy used means less fuel burned. Less fuel burned means less pollution.
Personally I don’t consider it a hardship to change my clocks twice a year before I go to bed on a Saturday night. Now that I am retired I find it even less of a bother than it was when I was still working. My schedule in retirement is no schedule. Who cares what time it is?
Rex
"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved" - Victor Hugo
(This post was edited by RexC on Apr 2, 2006, 4:57 PM)
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