That nuisance time change

Set your clocks back an hour this morning. Hopefully the tortuous process will end sometime soon.

Daylight saving time began at 2 a.m. today and will end at 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 7. But there is growing sentiment to end the barbaric practice and get beyond what many working people experience as an hour of lost sleep.

Writing this column does not require 40 hours of work so I haven’t been on that kind of schedule for years. But like everybody else I have to change my clocks so I’m not early for appointments and don’t tune in an hour early for the evening news.

In the fall, when you turn your clocks back, the problem is even worse. Then you tend to be late for everything if you haven’t reset your clocks.

The purpose of setting the clocks ahead in the spring is so you will have more sunshine in the evenings when people can make better use of it. Of course that never made sense in the land of the midnight sun, but we always changed our clocks with the rest of the nation so we wouldn’t be even more out of step with folks in far places.

Years ago I worked for ARCO, the now-defunct oil company that was based in Dallas, Texas. My boss was in Dallas and there was (and is) a three-hour time difference between here and there. Extending that to a four-hour time difference — as there is now between here and the East Coast — would have been a real problem for our communications.

The four-hour time gap between Anchorage and New York is especially troublesome for Alaskans who deal with the nation’s financial capital on a real-time basis, like stockbrokers. The same goes for those here who need to know what is going on in Washington, D.C. at any given moment.

These days I don’t have to worry about such things though we recently had a puppy who would wake up and start poking me at 5:45 every morning even when it was totally dark. He didn’t have a watch that I know of and, fortunately, he is now with another family more suited to his idiosyncrasies.

Benjamin Franklin proposed messing with the clocks to create more daylight but a New Zealand entomologist is credited with getting it started by campaigning for it. He wanted a two-hour time change to make it easier for him to get up and chase moths. Since most of the world could care less about chasing moths, it’s unclear why everybody else went along with it, although they did cut the difference to one hour.

The idea got a lot of support during World War I as a way to save energy needed for the war effort. The thinking was that people would be spending more time outdoors in the sunlight and less time indoors with their lights on.

Not everybody goes along with the time-change thing. States can opt out if they want. Hawaii and parts of Arizona have already decided to skip it. So have American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Increasingly people all over the nation are saying Daylight Saving Time. Who needs it?

Tom Brennan is an Anchorage columnist and author of six books. He was a reporter/columnist for The Anchorage Times and an editor and columnist at The Voice of The Times.