How is it that I didn’t hear about this sooner?  It appears that this year Daylight Savings Time is starting earlier, and ending later, than its traditional first-of-April to end-of-October run.  It will begin this year on March 11^th, and end on November 4^th – a bonus four weeks for no additional cost.

The thing is… no one seems to be aware of this fact!  Chatting with my fellow coffee connoisseurs at Java Nation today (where I went to purchase my first of 4 coffee beverages that I have been allocated for the day per Garth’s whiz-bang formula), no one that I spoke to was even aware of the change.  It appears that everyone is innocently going about their business with no plans to change their clocks or their smoke alarm batteries until the first Sunday in April. 

Well, this should make things interesting.

For those folks that don’t get clued in by showing up for church an hour late on Sunday morning, or missing Desperate Housewives by an hour on Sunday night… Monday morning is going to be absolute chaos.  You know that dream we’ve all had when everyone else knew about the big test and studied for it, but we showed up to school without a clue and were destined to fail?  Well it will be like a real-life version of that for thousands of people when they show up to work on the 12^th and discover everyone else has already been there for an hour. 

I’m thinking there’s going to be a lot of interesting goings-on at airports and train stations on Sunday and Monday too.  These days, even by showing up two hours in advance there is a good chance you’ll miss your flight with all of the extra security measures you have to deal with.  Imagine the sense of panic that will hit a large portion of the population when they show up to check-in that weekend and discover that an hour has magically disappeared.

So why are they making this change that is destined to cause mass confusion, missed flights, and a mini Y2K-like panic over updating automated systems that up to now have been programmed to not make the time change until April?  To save electricity of course.  The whole purpose of Daylight Savings Time in the first place was to shift the activities of the day to better coincide with daylight hours, and therefore reduce the number of light bulbs being used.  So theoretically, the longer we extend Daylight Savings Time, the more energy we save.

Will the potential savings outweigh the confusion?  I suppose in the overall big picture, yes.  But they better get a better marketing campaign going on this change, and fast!  Because right now I feel like that poor guy in the beginning of Armageddon that sees what’s coming before the rest of the world does, and knows there’s a big mess of chaos on the way.

In the meantime I’ll take some quiet comfort in the fact that my kids will get to go trick-or-treating before nightfall for the first time in their lives, and that the clock in my mini-van (that I never changed last October) will be back in phase three weeks earlier this year.