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Daylight Savings Time comes to a close
By Jared MorganSOMEWHERE IN TIME For those with a “here and now,” aboriginal sense of time (including those resistant Arizonians), the end of Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. Sunday will have meant nothing. For those who didn’t like having their extra hour of sleep taken from them in the first place, it’s probably too little, too late.
“It never fails, somewhere between 10 to 15 people will come in and ask me to reset their watches after Sunday,” said Rick Zoda, sales associate at Tic Time in Santa Monica Place mall. “It irritates me. Why have a watch if you don’t know how to use it?”
Zoda said that none of the people who came last year for a time change even bought their watches from Tic Tock. He doesn’t charge these time transients for his services, but will reset more than a dozen watches one week later than he did last year because of a bill President Bush signed on Aug. 8, 2005.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has moved the Standard Daylight Time forward one week, now ending on the first Sunday of November.
The new schedule will remain in place until Congress decides whether or not it wants to revert back to the old schedule.
The move is part of a study to monitor and curb the country’s energy consumption.
But why a week late?
“I think it had something to do with saving energy,” Melody Greene, 52, of Santa Monica. “But I don’t think, for us, it saves energy.”
For Greene, Daylight Saving Time is only an inconvenience.
“We have to wake up early anyway. It’s difficult getting up in the morning when it’s dark,” she said.
The forward shift in Standard Daylight Time “was a little confusing,” said Greene. “Some of our electronics reset and others didn’t.”
Over at Macy’s, also located in Santa Monica Place, the department store uses a ceiling-mounted projector near its second-floor entrance to cast an image of a clock with a ticking second hand onto the floor.
“Sunday morning, one of our technicians will get up on a ladder and change the clock,” said Milinda Martin, a Macy’s spokesperson.
BUT, BABY, IT’S DARK OUT THERE
The effects of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 have lagged for this long to allow companies time to update any time clock software that they might use.
But Daylight Saving Time affects people differently, sometimes taking a serious toll, like for those who suffer from Seasonal Defective Disorder. The syndrome is characterized by a shift in mood, or depression, when the weather gets bleak and the sky gets dark.
For those with Seasonal Defective Disorder, “it is very much like depression,” said Dr. Yvonne Thomas, a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in self-esteem. “It’s uncanny ... It happens when the sun’s not out. And this is not a contrived or created event.
“Not being exposed to sunlight can certainly make people feel down.”
Thomas has used light boxes, devices that simulate sunlight, in the past to treat her patients.
But Daylight Saving Time wasn’t created to cater to those with mood disorder. The law that governs the Daylight Saving Time shift is known The Uniform Time Act of 1966.
According to the California Energy Commission, the law acts to maintain uniformity in the event of national time change, but does not require that time change occur.
Benjamin Franklin, in a 1784 essay entitled “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light,” was the first to suggest a form of Daylight Saving Time.