Today would have been when Alberta would set our clocks back one hour, falling into Standard Time until the spring. It was the one time change we all liked, because we got an extra hour of rest. Spring time change was, of course, quite the opposite.The percentage of people who actually like time change is, rounded to the nearest hundredth, statistically zero. It’s a good thing we’re finally getting off this stupid habit, and it’ll do us all some good.
Quite a few places realized that Daylight “Savings” was a really bad idea and started dumping the concept years ago. Saskatchewan had the right idea back in 1966 and decided it was pointless. Arizona a year later, only because they forgot to opt out of the national plan. China dropped the concept in 1991. Japan tried it for a short while between 1948 and 1951, thanks in part to American occupation, and dropped it like a turd-filled paper bag. Russia went to “summer time” in 2011, only to realize it was the wrong choice, going to standard time three years later. Today, just a third of all countries which used to use Daylight Savings still recognize it.
And if Daylight “Savings” wasn’t bad enough (boy, our descendants are going to think we were a special level of stupid for doing it), it pales to the hell of time zones.
I’ve been over this before, so let’s revisit it: Time zones are stupid. Let’s just pick one and get one with it.
I know, the first and most difficult question: Which one would we choose?
We also have: It’s called Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC (no, the acronym does not line up). We’ve had this since 1967. It was approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which covers every country. It’s been done. Orange-coloured objections aside, we’re moving on.
UTC+00:00 is the “start” of the day. Yes, it coincides with the Prime Meridian, so yes, it’s Euro-centric, but for the purposes of this argument – and I assure you on this – it’s irrelevant. You could put the line through the middle of Des Moines, and it wouldn’t matter. I’m just using the standards that already exist.
I am proposing that the Earth day – yes, the entire planet – starts at 00:00, which is UTC+00:00. Every clock, every where, uses the same time.
Which begs the next question: But how will I know when to get up?
Local convention. For some, the times won’t change dramatically. Their alarms will go off at 06:00 like they do today, they’ll wake up, and see the rising sun (ish, but you get what I’m saying). Skip a few hours to the west, their alarms will go off at 12:00. While folks in London, UK might be eating lunch, we’ll be eating breakfast. The only difference is where the sun is.
Does it matter that the sun is overhead at 12:00? (Yes, I would also see an end to “noon” and “midnight”.) Why should it? We chose this in the past as a form of figuring out local time to work locally. It was when it became much easier and faster to meet with people in distant cities that we invented time zones. Remove the AM and PM, stick to the 24 hour clock, and within a few short weeks, it won’t matter anymore. The local convention will be what everyone uses.
This already happens. Iceland, which lays at a longitude putting it in UTC-1, sticks to UTC+0. It’s only an hour and they just deal with things accordingly. Being so far north, the winter light is already short, and in the summer, the sun barely sets.
China kind of also does this, using Beijing Time. The entire five-zone country uses a single time. It seems odd to foreigners, but I’m sure to the Chinese, why would you bother changing clocks needlessly? Several other countries, like Kazakhstan, India, and Greenland have one zone instead of multiple (India also cheats, shifting their clocks 30 minutes to better adapt to areas that still do Daylight Savings). Even Russia, which should have 13 time zones, merges areas together to have only 8.
So if we do decide this is a good idea – and I genuinely think it is (no sarcasm, I promise) – we even have an approximation for the local convention: the existing UTC delta (and for the love of sanity, do not use the existing time zone). For example, Berlin would wake at 01:00, have lunch at 13:00, dinner at 19:00, not much different than they do now. Further to the west, where I am, Calgary is UTC-6. Hence, we would wake at 12:00, eat lunch at 18:00, and have dinner at 00:00.
But… wait… isn’t that the next day…?
Now we get to the next question: spanning days. This is an unavoidable issue, and will likely cause the most headaches.
Because, yes, if you head out to, say, Auckland, New Zealand (currently UTC+12), they’d be rising in the morning around 18:00 on a Tuesday, going to bed on Wednesday. In Honolulu, Hawaii, people would be getting up at 22:00, and getting to work the following day.
When I ask myself “is that a problem”, I have to think about it. And that’s because I’m 54 and grew up with paper calendars. A day was a day. It was a box, not divisible, though something could span multiple days. It wasn’t until I travelled internationally east and west that I had more of an appreciation for how little days really mattered: you leave North America (well, western North America) in the early evening, arrive in Europe in the early afternoon the next day. Flying back to North America from Japan? You might actually arrive before you took off – it’s almost a time machine because of the international date line.
We don’t live in a world of paper calendars anymore. Everything is electronic. My phone adapts, as does my email. If I’ve had to work remotely from another time zone, I shift my time accordingly (if possible) and let my team know what hours I will be available. It would be markedly easier without having to calculate for time zone differences. So what if the calendar day changes between the time I get up and I go to bed? It’s just a division of time, no different than an hour. It’s the same division for everyone, happening at the same time.
We would all celebrate New Years Eve, globally, at the same time. Yes, some of us would be in the middle of the day, but … so what? Yeah, it would be better for fireworks to have it when it’s dark. So have the fireworks in the dark, and cheers at 00:00, wherever you happen to be.
It’s time to change, one last time, for one time.