craigmcn

Yeah, yeah, it’s Tuesday and DST changed Sunday, I probably should have said something 2 days ago. But I only noticed one problem yesterday and needed it confirmed today. As well, one other thing was confirmed today.

Firstly, I don’t understand the need for DST. Supposedly it saves energy, because there’s more light later in the day. Fine. Understood. It makes sense. But last week it was fairly light out when I woke up and now this week it’s dark again. So where I needed fewer lights in the morning last week, I need more this week. Energy savings? Really? Over the next 3 weeks, I don’t see that there’ll be much difference. People pretty much start turning on lights around 6pm regardless; most outdoor lights are on solar sensors, so the time doesn’t matter; and office buildings have the lights on anyway, regardless of the amount of sunlight available. Energy savings? Really?

Secondly, there was considerable time and effort expended trying to update computers to manage the change to DST 3 weeks earlier (and 1 week later). We had 3 separate outages for the system I work with and general slowness over 4 weeks as the back-end systems were periodically unavailable. I’m sure every other company had major issues of the same sort. And today I found out that the reason I can’t NetFile my tax return is due to a problem caused by a “malfunctioning software patch”. (Yes, my taxes are done already!) The most prevalent software patches recently have been for DST. Coincidence? I think not.

I was once told that DST is helpful to farmers. Umm … how? The wheat, beans, corn, apples, oranges, whatever use the sun. From the perspective of the crops, the sun’s either out or it’s not. They’re not going to grow any faster with DST. From the perspective of the chickens, cows, sheep and goats, again, the sun’s either out or it’s not. They’re not too concerned about the time. And given that there’s a considerable number of farmers in Saskatchewan, why don’t they use DST?

So, really, other than to piss me off twice a year, I don’t see the point.