It's time for confusion in Indiana

4/2/2006

This is one out of the two mornings each year when we find ourselves with a sudden nostalgia for all things analog.

What time is it in your house right now, anyway?

Did you remember to reset all the clocks for our annual "spring forward" leap in time? Or were you unable to locate a willing young'un to monkey around with all your digital timekeepers?

OK, enough questions. It's still morning, and some of us are trying to slurp our first cup of coffee. And yes, we're kind of tired.

With every passing year, it gets harder to make the physiological adjustment, although you really wouldn't think shaving off an hour of sleep one way or the other off would be such a big deal.

But it is.

For this reason, it might be a good idea to stay out of Indiana today - or maybe even the whole rest of the week - because Indiana is joining the rest of us and reordering their world according to daylight savings time.

Of course, this doesn't end the state's division into two separate time zones. This morning, 18 Indiana counties are living life according to central time, while the state's 74 other counties are functioning along with us in the Eastern time zone.

If they can live with that, you wouldn't think making the transition to daylight savings would be so tough. And yet, judging by the level of statewide grousing this has caused, you'd think Hoosiers had been asked to endure sex-change operations, not time-zone adjustments.

There's been a lot of yipping there about Indiana's embrace of daylight savings. There were even newspaper articles explaining how to "do" daylight savings. If you're supposed to be somewhere this morning at 10 a.m., for example, the advice would be not to compensate by showing up at 11 a.m. No, just move your clock up and adjust accordingly.

Well, give 'em a break. It's still new.

That must be why the governor gave bar owners an exemption last night (er, this morning), letting them set their clocks at 3 a.m. and thereby avoiding the loss of an hour's worth of bar receipts.

But as proof that there is no situation which Americans cannot exploit for commercial gain, one Indiana teen is trying to profit from the switch.

The Associated Press reports that 18-year-old Evan Kelso is offering to reset digital clocks in homes and cars around Fort Wayne for the low, low price of $10. Evan intends to work from today on into the week, which works out well since his high school is on spring break.

He sees his biggest market as senior citizens, which I guess he must define as anyone old enough to have to think twice (or three our four times) about tinkering with clocks.

Evan told the AP that he got the idea for this money-making scheme while Indiana legislators were carping about the time change.

"I just kind of sat there and thought, 'We got to capitalize on this,' " he said.

I guess you could say he's being timely.