When our General Assembly convenes next month, there may be a debate over time. As it is, we go on daylight saving time by advancing our clocks an hour in March, and set them back an hour in November to return to standard time.
Rep. Ed Vigil, a Democrat from Fort Garland, wants to put us on standard time year-round, while Sen. Greg Brophy, a Republican from Wray, proposes staying on daylight time all year.
Either is better than the current system, whose difficulties I blame on the Chinese. They export millions of cheap but accurate timepieces to this country. My grandparents may have gotten by with a chiming parlor clock and a wind- up alarm clock, but we have at least one horological device in every room, plus wristwatches, dashboard clocks and timepieces on stoves and other appliances. They all must be reset twice a year, which involves teetering on a ladder or finding a long-lost instruction manual. At least modern computers handle this themselves.
Add to this a cause of minor domestic disharmony. Martha likes the kitchen clock to be set about 10 minutes ahead so that she’s sure of getting to her job on time. I prefer an accurate setting, and it annoys me when the clock on the wall, set to Martha Standard Time, conflicts with the “atomic clock” atop the refrigerator, automatically set to regular time.
The only problem with the atomic clock is the instructions, which tell you to insert batteries, then go to a window and point it toward Colorado, source of the standard time short-wave radio broadcasts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The directions were not written for people who have Colorado outside in every direction. But we’re used to being ignored in such matters. On TV, you encounter “10 Eastern, 9 Central, 7 Pacific” with no mention of our “8 Mountain.”
At any rate, Martha is not the only who uses substandard time. I once asked a local publican why his bar time was only 10 minutes ahead instead of the usual 15 or 20. Probably a brief power outage, he said, and no one had yet climbed up to reset the big “Walter’s Pilsner” clock.
He added that he wished the Salida City Council would designate a standard municipal clock. “I could lose my liquor license if I pour after 2 a.m.,” he said, “and what are we supposed to go by? The cop’s watch?”
Brophy’s proposal for year- round daylight time conflicts with federal law, which doesn’t offer states that option. He questions whether the U.S. Constitution gives Congress that power, which could make this a state’s rights issue.
Time regulation does appear to come under the constitutional power of Congress “to regulate Commerce . . . among the several States” and to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”
But if this is a local-control issue, why stop at the state level? By sun time, when it’s noon in Denver, it’s only 11:44 a.m. in Dinosaur, and already 12:11 p.m. in Wray.
Each locale could have its own time, and when it was necessary to standardize, we could use Zulu Time, also known as Co-ordinated Universal Time and formerly as Greenwich Mean Time. That’s what the Internet runs on, so it’s quite accessible.
Or we could shift to Southern Colorado Standard Time. It is formally defined as “Las cosas suceden cuando suceden” (“Things happen when they happen”). It’s a time standard that reduces stress while improving one’s disposition. So if the General Assembly must tamper with our time, that’s the way to go.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
