P.M. means night

The annual Daylight Saving Time “leap forward” is probably my favorite of Gov. Mitch Daniels’ achievements. This is where his real supporters and I differ.

March produces an inevitable grumbling from the very people who helped elect the governor. Underlying their complaints is a discontentment that someone they believed to be a conservative, an upholder of stasis, would have the gall to modernize the way Hoosiers register the hour.

Political discontent is one thing. Indeed, even enthusiastic supporters can hardly be expected to support the entirety of any elected official’s agenda.

One group of complaints about daylight saving concerns the nuisance caused by extending daylight later into the evening.

People accustomed to going to bed early, at, say, 9 p.m., find themselves unable to sleep when it is nearly as bright as midday outside their windows.

Though I arrive at a different conclusion, my personal schedule is likewise my primary reason for feeling the way I do about DST. I happen to rarely be awake during the early morning hours made dark by the time shift, and I am almost always awake to enjoy the additional hours of summer sun that have illuminated the evenings for the last few years.

But there is another argument, one much less credible, albeit more humorous, that is also commonplace. When the bill was passed in 2005, I read a deluge of furious letters to the editor in local newspapers.

Many of those who wrote in expressed their concern that human beings had dared to change what they held to be “God’s Time.”

Though some who advocate the immutability of time do so with less metaphysical pomposity, most affiliated with this camp make it sound as if the history of the universe had been measured in hour-long segments since Adam and Eve fell into the Garden.

Thanks to the fall semester I spent abroad in Lima, Peru, my yearly rendezvous with those malcontented with time change had a new reference point last week.

As a friend and I entered a bus station in a provincial city in the Andes, we scanned the sign for bus departure times for Lima that afternoon. We were happy to see that one bus was leaving at noon; we’d be able to make it back in time to finish our homework before classes on Monday morning.

We approached the desk and asked the cashier for the noon departure.

“We don’t have a bus leaving at noon,” she responded.

I was not entirely surprised. A bus company in an out-of-the-way city could not really be expected to run all of the routes they advertised on their faded sign. Still, we decided to press the issue.

“But the sign says there is a bus leaving at 12 p.m.”

The cashier composed her face and said in a very authoritative voice, “No, ‘p.m.’ means night.”

Her logic, of course, doesn’t explain 1 p.m. very well, but no matter.

The cashier understood what many “God’s Time” resisters do not grasp; setting the clock as we like is entirely to our own advantage.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu