Sunday, November 04, 2012

The Additional Hour

After a long time, I felt there was lot of time at hand today. It was literally true. There was an additional hour gifted today because Time was pulled back by 1 hour at 2 am to get back into the standard time as today signified the end of daylight saving time. We did not change the time in the house clocks or watches so that each time we saw the time, we felt happy that it was actually an hour less. Imagine seeing time as 7 o’clock on a Sunday evening only to realize that it is actually 6 o’clock! Every additional minute is worth it on a day before the grueling week starts!

But a lot of things about changing the time doesn’t make sense to me. I read about it on the Wikipedia and it made some sense but the amount of complexity that a time change brings about in the world is enormous especially for those working on massive amount of data and related information-gathering. For folks who are monitoring a flight’s plan, lets say, the flight is at one location and altitude at 1:30 am. Now, the same flight will be in a different location and different altitude but at the same time 1:30 am! Many jobs processing output files will append file name with date and time considering that time is a unique fact. If these jobs are processing hourly, then there will be an issue of the second file overwriting the first file. A patient’s pulse monitoring between 1 am and 2 am will have two versions of truth for the same duration.

The scenarios are mind boggling and this concept of changing time twice a year is utterly unnecessary and self-complicated. Just to generate more employment, I guess. Like so many other things in this country.

Anyways, for now, let me enjoy the additional hour.