Spring ahead!!!!

Photo courtesy ofmapsofworld



Like my body's clock isn't screwed up enough. Anybody else get messed up when we change the clocks? (Hey - I still have to hold my hand up to figure out right from left so you can imagine what time changes do to me.) I suffer for weeks! Usually the first couple of days I play the "it's 4am so it's really 3am game" as I lie wide awake in bed trying to figure out if I should get up or not. After about a week, I'm so confused it doesn't matter anymore. I just go into zombie mode until we "fall back" in November. You should have seen me last year when we had to add a few more time zone abbreviations. I had a job where I booked web exchanges with other companies across the country. What a challenge. You'd be suprised how many people didn't pay attention. Can't blame them I suppose. I only paid attention because I could really screw up the schedule at work if I was off an hour while booking the web ex's.

The United States uses nine standard time zones. From east to west they are Atlantic Standard Time (AST), Eastern Standard Time (EST), Central Standard Time (CST), Mountain Standard Time (MST), Pacific Standard Time (PST), Alaskan Standard Time (AKST), Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HST), Samoa standard time (UTC-11) and Chamorro Standard Time (UTC+10).

The names in each time zone change along with Daylight Saving Time.
Eastern Standard Time (EST) becomes Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), and so forth.


How do you military folks ever get the MILITARY TIME ZONE CODES straight in your head:

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is also referred to as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The (-9h) in Alaskan Standard Time refers to that time zone being nine hours behind UTC or GMT and so forth for the other Time Zones.........



Remember when we only had 4 time zones to worry about -- Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. As a kid, I used to love walking to the bus stop in the dark for a few weeks. It seemed like it just took only one day to get things straight back then.

You should see me try to change the clock in my car. At least the cable and cell phone companies change it automatically (kinda creepy though).




The history of daylight-saving time:

1784 - Benjamin Franklin is thought to have come up with the idea for daylight-saving time. In a whimsical letter to a French journal, he said that Parisians could save thousands of francs a year by waking up earlier during the summer because it would prevent them from having to buy so many candles to light the evening hours.

1918 - The U.S. first adopts daylight-saving time, in the same act that created standard time zones, in an effort to save energy during World War I. It didn't prove popular, and, as a result, it was repealed the following year.

1942 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted "war-time," a year-round daylight-saving time to save energy during World War II. After the year-round shift ended in 1945, many states adopted their own summer time changes.

1966 - Congress established a national pattern for summer time changes with the Uniform Time Act. The act came in response from the transportation industry, which demanded consistency across time zones. The U.S. Department of Transportation now oversees time changes in the United States.

1973 - An oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries led Congress to enact a test period of year-round daylight-saving time in 1974 and 1975. The test period was controversial; it ended after complaints that the dark winter mornings endangered children traveling to school. The U.S. returned to summer daylight-saving time in 1975.

1986 - The federal law is amended to start daylight-saving time on the first Sunday in April, beginning in 1987. The ending date of daylight-saving time was never changed, and remained the last Sunday in October through 2006.

2005 - On August 8, President Bush signs the Energy Policy Act of 2005 into law. Part of the act will extend daylight-saving time starting in 2007, from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

2008 - Daylight-saving time begins on Sunday, March 9 and ends on Sunday, November