Have You Got The Time For A Date?

Have You Got The Time For A Date? was Originally Posted on December 29, 2011 by

It reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode; people losing an hour of their life. Wasn’t there a TV show about people losing time, like an hour with no recolection? Some people on earth soon will lose a DAY of their lives and it has nothing to do with being drunk and passing out! Read on!

Many people have no idea what time it is in Hawaii. I can understand that because out here we don’t care all that much either. Oh, there are jobs where you HAVE to be there at a certain time, but for many of us, it is “island time” and we can be late if we want.

I am often asked “What time is it out there?” and I also receive calls at 3am because people just have no clue. Hawaii is in the Hawaiian Time Zone. We do NOT do daylight savings time mainly because that is just silly. You change your clocks forward an hour then backward an hour and sometimes those dates change and you end up early or late for church or to watch “the game”.

They say that one reason is the farmers. Farmers don’t care what the clock says, they get up early before it gets hot outside. Here we get up early to try to get things done before the wind changes or the rain starts.

They say they don’t want school kids to go to school in the dark. Well then, rather than change the clocks and disrupt everyone else, start school later. Remember the saying “Don’t raise the bridge, lower the river”. Don’t change the clocks, think outside the box!

You can take my suggestion and move your clock ONCE by 1/2 an hour and leave it there! Imagine the time savings of not constantly moving the time twice a year. You can always adjust your arrival and departure times to manage being 1/2 hour off from the current time. I mean, if you can’t determine if it is winter or summer, then you have no right to be leaving the house at all.

So for the poor people who don’t have multiple timezone clocks on the wall, we are earlier than U.S. Mainland time. If you live on the East coast, we are 5 or 6 hours earlier than you. From the West coast we are 2 or 3 hours earlier. I can’t tell you exactly because you keep changing the time on your clocks!

If you think this is odd, then the following is even more complicated. Imagine losing a day! Almost everywhere in the world will have a Friday December 30th. Everywhere but Samoa. They chose Friday I guess so that they will still have a New year.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports that the nation’s prime minister said the current time zone, in which Samoa is a day behind Australia and New Zealand, means a loss of two full working days each week. Samoa is a major trading partner with them and they want to be closer in time to their partners. The newspaper reports that American Samoa will not undergo the change.

So how do they lose a day? Well, they push their island country westward across the International dateline. The dateline is already a bit jagged from being in the middle of nowhere and I guess the ocean currents move it back and forth like the shoreline because of the tide.

So today before bed, Samoans will grab a black magic maker and scribble out Friday from the calendars and go blistfully to bed for 32 hours it will appear. I hope that they do NOT take an extra day of medicine because that can really mess them up. There will be a giant drop in births for the week, month and year, having lost 24 hours in the process.

Statistics, calendars and trivia items will all be changed because of this decision. I hope they make the most of it.