Since the Americans have just had it again, and we will have it again
soon…
It's hard to rant about time changes, which offend me
æsthetically, without ranting about everything else too.
Precious little schoolchildren going to school, or coming back from
it, in the dark? They're barely allowed out of the house unsupervised
anyway. (And changing the clocks just makes things worse, however you
change them.)
Why not change standard working hours instead? If only some
organisations change them, or they let people like their own, you can
get rid of the insanity of rush hours too. Work days are clearly far
too long anyway; even eight hours is longer than a human being can be
mentally productive in a day, and many places are longer these days.
And in turn, if something is so urgent that you need to talk to
someone else about it right now rather than waiting until a small
window of time when you're both at work, someone has messed up the
project management.
Everyone going to work at the same time is fine for the factory but
makes very little sense for the office. Unless poor managers want to
feel big by looking over people's shoulders.
I am well aware that there are many more problems in the world, but
this seems to tie in to more of them than I expected.
- Posted by Chris Bell at
10:11am on
14 March 2026
The main trouble with the time change is people complaining about it every damn year. Also saying they get an hour less sunlight when the clocks change to GMT. Well, yes, after a bit they do (at the rate of three or four minutes less per day so after about seventeen days), but that is because the days do get shorter in winter; the clocks changing has nothing whatever to do with it.
- Posted by ashley pollard at
10:50am on
14 March 2026
I stand with you on this one, if only because messing with sleep patterns is one sure-fire why of decompensating people's mental well-being.
- Posted by DrBob at
04:09pm on
14 March 2026
Then again you get the chaos of my work, where they need bums on seats to cover the phone lines and support folk on the phones from about 07.45 to 18.30 every day. So we have the most complicated scheduling process where it is set up for 6 months in advance (sensible) but starts with edicts like "Okay everyone has to do at least 1 early start and one late finish per week". Then degenerates into horse trading and/or a 3 line whip, because - surprise, surprise - no-one wants to do early Mondays or late Fridays. And too many people have picked late finish on Wednesday. So now EVERYONE has to do one late Friday in eight, and two early starts. Etc etc. Rinse and repeat.
(It's especially irksome they won't let the larks do all early starts, not let the owls do all late finishes!)
- Posted by DrBob at
11:32am on
15 March 2026
There's properly peer reviewed medical data from the USA that shows the daily number of heart attacks spikes the day everyone gets an hour less sleep and the number drops the day everyone gets an extra hour's sleep.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
01:04pm on
15 March 2026
Statistics clearly show there are more road traffic accidents for about a week twice a year when the clocks change. Messing with people's sleep patterns is not good, and it gains us essentially nothing.
- Posted by RogerBW at
03:05pm on
16 March 2026
(Re DrBob at #3) When I was working in network operations, we needed full time coverage, two people (since one might have to leave to fix something while the other stayed in the control room). The powers that be kept on trying to find a way to do it with fewer than eight people, and it kept on not working because even young enthusiastic techies do actually want to work for fewer than 1/3 of their total waking hours.
(The bosses were also oddly resistant to shift swapping, even though none of them had ever worked shifts.)