Whoa! It's time to spring forward
Daylight Saving begins Sunday

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — This Sunday is the day people like Bertha Damon, Lisa Willetto and Nabor Martinez hate to see come up every year.

It’s the day that most of the nation spring their clocks forward one hour (at 2 a.m.) each year as part of the observance of Daylight Saving Time. Which means that Damon, Willetto and Martinez, all of whom work as bus drivers for the Gallup-McKinley County School District and who have to leave for work as early as 4 a.m., will be losing an hour.

At that time of the morning, they said, that hour is precious but Willetto, with 14 years on the job, and Martinez, with 16, said it usually only takes a few days to get used to the new time schedule. And there’s always the reverse of Sunday’s time change, in November, when bus drivers and those who report to work at ungodly hours get that blessed extra hour of sleep.

The ones who really feel the affect of Daylight Saving Time, said Martinez, are the pupils and especially the ones in the early grades. Each year, he said, ridership on the school buses goes down just after Daylight Saving Time in the winter because parents forget to reset their clocks.

“The little ones fall to sleep in the buses and have to be woken up,” Willetto said.

This year’s observance of daylight — at 2 a.m. March 9 — is the earliest it has ever been, and people can blame Congress for that. In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act which moved the start of DST from April to the second weekend in March in order to save energy.

At that time, congressional studies indicated that the measure would save 10,000 barrels of oil each day through reduced use of power by businesses during daylight hours. Since then, however, there have been private studies that question the energy savings and even argued that by starting DST early, it was resulting in more energy use.

In this area, the start of DST always causes more confusion because Arizona is one of the states that does not observe DST. Since the entire Navajo Reservation observes DST, even the Arizona portion, this means that state offices and some other offices that deal a lot with Arizona, are operating on a different time than the rest of the community.

People with computers that have Vista or XP as their Windows option should also be aware that some of these computers that are more than two years old will revert to DST in April instead of this Sunday.

To insure Windows users aren’t hit with a daylight time bug, Microscoft has launched an automatic diagnostic and update service on its Web site that installs patches on systems that need them. The service is available for all versions of Windows Vista and most versions of XP, as well as Windows Server.