Clock change day

 Ah, Easter Sunday and an hour extra in bed as the clocks in the east of Australia went back an hour for winter.

Well, that was the plan, but nobody had told the cats so we were leapt on and meowed at when their morning kibble did not appear at what would have been seven fifteen the day before and is now of course six fifteen.

We held out and ignored them until a bit before seven, before giving up and feeding them.

But of course it underlines just how artificial time and time zones are as a construct.

Before 1895, when standard timezones were introduced in Australia (UTC+8 in the west, +9 in the centre and +10 in the east) time was based on the time in the colonial capital, meaning that Melbourne was roughly twenty minutes behind Sydney, and passengers changing from the NSW railways standard guage train to the Victorian broad guage train had to adjust their watches accordingly.

Given that the trains were pretty slow, it probably made no practical difference, and of course there were no time dependent cross border media.

Later on, South Australia found that being an hour behind Melbourne was inconvenient and changed to UTC +9h30, which again, as no one much lived west of Port August or Port Lincoln really wasn't a problem.

Until October 1916, Ireland used Dublin time which again was round about twenty minutes behind London. Doing so gave people in the west of Ireland a little more light in the mornings, and as the only means of getting to Ireland from the UK was by comparitively slow steamship, the time difference didn't matter that much, there was no radio or tv, and telephones were rarely used for business, and telegrams probably took the best part of an hour to be delivered, possibly longer.

And while most countries had changed to a standard timezone offset - either on the hour or more rarely the half hour  by the nineteen twenties, not all did, with Liberia only changing in 1972.

And until the internet came on the scene, to be honest it probably didn't matter that much.

Clocks and watches had to be changed manually when you crossed timezones and aircraft and train schedules could incorporate an allowance for a timezone change.

With the internet and the need to synchronize and timestamp files things changed.

In fact in the early days of TCP/IP networking in the UK when things were not as reliable as they are today, I used to dread clock change day, with some servers on our NFS based pc network failing to update correctly, requiring a reboot and resync, but then it was only twice a year.

Nowadays, the only reason for lining up on the half hour or hour for our timezone in bureaucratic niceness, the computers, phones and the rest of our booming buzzing electronic confusion could handle wierd time offsets and daylight savings  reliably.

Perhaps just not the cats...