Life's coming at you fast with weeks-early DST

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Mar 9, 2007 | by Patrick MaySTAFF

Go ahead. Explain daylight-saving time. We dare you.

Um, time springs forward, so it's lighter earlier. No, wait. It's lighter later. So if you normally get up in the dark, it'll be even darker? Or lighter?

Exactly.

And if DST makes you feel dumb, get ready to feel dumb three weeks earlier.

Congress has decided to stretch out daylight-saving time. So instead of beginning the first Sunday in April, it will start at 2 a.m. Sunday.

And there's more: It will end Nov. 4, one week later.

Confused? Even if you aren't confused, you could still blow it by getting to work late or arriving for that 9 a.m. flight at 10.

And you won't be alone.

"I have six or seven things in the house I'll have to reset that aren't computer-driven," said the Rev. Paul Weisbeck at Saint William Catholic Church in Los Altos. "You always forget one clock, and that's the one that'll mess you up. Your heart jumps. Oh, my God! I'm supposed to be somewhere right now! So you come blowing in a half-hour late, too embarrassed to say what really happened, and then you have to come up with some other lame excuse."

The government believes the move could save the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, but we won't know for sure until the secretary of energy reports back to Congress on the actual impact of the time shift.

Meanwhile, there is likely to be some head-scratching.

"Are we springing forward or springing back?" asked Cesar Ramirez, bartender at the Flying Martini Brothers Bar and Bistro in downtown San Jose. "By moving it up earlier than it normally is, this might throw off our customers even more," he said. "We'llhave to tell them to leave like we always do -- they'll just be getting home a lot later than they thought."

First mentioned half-jokingly by Benjamin Franklin as a way to conserve candles, DST was eventually promoted as an energy-saving plan that would make better use of daylight in the summer. Following the lead of other countries, the United States jumped on the daylight-saving bandwagon in 1918. But things quickly got crazy, as states and cities adopted their own versions.

Finally, in 1966, Congress established a uniform nationwide system, running from the last Sunday in April until the last Sunday in October. Two decades later, Congress pushed up the starting date to the first Sunday in April.

And every step of the way, the idea has been controversial.

A lot of farmers hate it for imposing unnatural time constraints on natural processes, like milking cows and picking vegetables. People who suffer from sleep disorders are thrown for an even bigger loop. And driving can become more dangerous when the time-bending begins.

It's been called "Black Monday," that first workday commute after springing forward. Studies by Canadian psychologist Stanley Coren have shown a 7 percent increase in traffic accidents immediately following the time shift, partly the result of a darker morning commute (today's 6:33 a.m. sunrise becomes next Monday's 7:23 sunrise, since daylight also lengthens this time of year).

"We're already chronically sleep-deprived," said Coren, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "And when we deprive people of another hour of sleep, it makes them clumsy and stupid."

Silicon Valley's insomniacs are bracing for the worst.

"Each year when daylight-saving time arrives, we see patients start to panic -- What do I do? Do I need to be prepared somehow?'" said Miriam Taher, a nurse with San Jose sleep-disorder specialist Dr. Ali Bassiri. "Their sleep rhythms are bad to begin with. Moving it up three weeks could cause some people even more problems."

Computer users and technicians are worried about glitches with software that is still expecting DST to arrive in April. And some local farmers expect some inconvenience. Grant Brians, who grows heirloom organic vegetables in Hollister, says the later start to daylight will "make it harder to do same-day shipments. If we have a 1 p.m. deadline for some truck to go out, but we have one less hour of daylight to do our picking, we can't make it.

"It's just one of those well-meaning but slightly misguided things to do, " he said.

Others, though, welcome the earlier time shift.

"With all the recent rain and cold, and with 75 percent of my seating outside, I've been losing quite of bit of business lately," says Jay Meduri, owner of the Poor House Bistro in San Jose. "Maybe these three weeks of extra light in the afternoon will help me recoup my losses. I wish it would be daylight-saving time all the time."

For parents like Palo Alto mom Lucy Rector Filppu, the more DST the better: "I love daylight-saving time. It's that wonderful early taste of spring just around the corner."

And now having Halloween fall within the new daylight-saving parameters means safer trick-or-treating.

"You don't want your kids wandering around in the dark," she says.

With the new time arrangement, Weisbeck is preparing for an earlier version of another time-honored tradition -- that handful of parishioners bursting into church late for Sunday morning Mass.