It’s Five O’clock Somewhere

I keep a clock on my computer with the current local times in New York, (the same time zone as most of my family), Denver, Kharkiv, (my current location) and Moscow. It is seems easy enough to recall the differences in my head but that all will change next week because of the return to standard time.

Daylight savings time (also called Summer time in Europe) was originally used in the United States in 1918. A few European countries actually started using it a few years earlier during World War 1. The basic idea is that you turn your clock forward in the spring so the afternoons have more daylight and the mornings have less. This is thought to save electricity but there are some skeptics. In autumn you would turn your clock back to the previous time. In the United States we remember this by the idea of “Spring Forward, Fall Back”. This would traditionally be done on a Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning) and back in the days when the gin joints in the United States always closed at 1:30 A.M. it was nice for them to be open for an extra hour once a year.

This weekend Ukraine returns to standard time. I’m hoping my computers auto adjust but I will have to manually change my clock and my passel of watches. That seems simple enough but the United States does not make this modification until the following week. That will be a little confusing but it is exacerbated by the fact that Russia no longer observes daylight savings time so there will be no change in their clocks. It might not seem a big deal but I give lessons to a handful of students in Russia via Skype and they probably expect me to call them at the correct time. My head already hurts!

Posted by John