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On a Saturday night in Indiana, Armageddon looms. “This is like Y2K,” Purdue University information technology spokesman Steve Tally said to Wired News, “except this one is really happening.”

I, for one, am stocking up on canned goods. Because it is time – time for daylight-saving time, and there’s nothing that Steve Tally or anyone else in Indiana can do about it.

I can only surmise that you “sprang forward,” losing an entire hour out of your life at 2 a.m. Sunday like much of the rest of the country. I can only imagine the horror that passed through your brain Saturday night as you realized that your slumber would be cut an hour shorter than usual. Perhaps, however, you consider the biannual occurrence to be uneventful – a meaningless bother that you have to remember twice a year. Spring forward, fall back.

In Indiana, it is anything but uneventful. Indiana does not spring forward or fall back. Most of the counties in Indiana have not been practicing daylight-saving time since the early 1970s.

Some counties in Indiana are in the Central time zone, but most are in the Eastern time zone, leaving those counties that operate year-round on Eastern Standard Time to find themselves aligned in the summer months with the Central time zone, which is observing Central Daylight Time during those months – an hour ahead.

Still following?

Five counties that were in the Eastern time zone, however, unofficially observed daylight-saving time in order to stay aligned with the nearby cities of Louisville and Cincinnati , and 11 counties refuse to keep track of time by any other method than a sundial. OK, so I may have made that last point up. But everything else is true.

It was a perfectly logical system as long as you had a map, compass and calculator whenever you traveled through the state.

But last year, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels pushed through a law mandating that Indiana finally begin observing daylight-saving time in 2006. General dissatisfaction not seen in Indiana since, well, ever, coursed through the streets.

Bar owners said that they’d start losing business from patrons living in Eastern Daylight Time states flooding into Indiana to try to get one more hour of drinking in before the last call.

Movie theater owners said that they’d lose money since there will be more sunlight in the evenings. Several counties tried to defect to the Central time zone.

Tech workers like Tally said that computer software in Indiana is not equipped to make the time switches necessary for daylight-saving time.

The stream of Hoosiers flooding into Illinois to purchase DST-equipped Microsoft Outlook technology makes me feel like a Canadian who has swarms of elderly Americans fighting over my prescription drugs.

All of this makes me wonder why we even bother to change the clocks twice a year anyway. None of us are even sure why we do it.

Many believe it is for the benefit of farmers, but evidently farmers don’t actually like DST because, since they get up with the sun anyway, all it means is that they have to get up an hour earlier in the summer.

Actually, the main reason daylight-saving time is in practice because it saves energy. According to the Department of Transportation, the U.S. uses about 1 percent less energy per day during the DST months, because there’s more light in the evenings when more people tend to be home using electric and electronic equipment.

Yet there’s also a downside to the time change. A biologist at Kent State University, looking for effects of the time change on people’s biological clocks, studied insurance company records and found that the Monday after the “spring forward” regularly has one of the highest accident rates of the year.

A word of advice to those of you going to class this morning who feel more groggy than usual: Do not blame the feeling on a week of partying. Put the blame squarely at the feet of the amount of sleep you got on Saturday night – one hour less than usual.

If daylight-saving time saves energy because more people are using appliances during dark evenings than during dark mornings, then why don’t we save everyone the biannual fuss and adopt daylight-saving time year-round?

The California Legislature recommended just such a thing to Congress in May 2001, but the request was never acted upon.

I hereby suggest that California follow Indiana’s example and simply refuse to “fall back” at the end of autumn. Those of you who are tired of losing an hour of sleep once every spring, who are fearful of increased accidents or of missing a class because you forgot to change your clocks, stand in protest with me. California can become the one state in the union that will be perpetually on daylight-saving time; the rest of the country can jealously watch as we save our daylight.

We could even tauntingly throw a jar of saved daylight over the border into Nevada occasionally. “Here, Nevada! You have it! We have plenty more of it saved up!”

Perhaps one day the rest of the nation will join us. But come October, at least in California, it would not be time – not be time for standard time – and there’s nothing the rest of the country could do about it.

A man can dream, can’t he?

If Atherton has not yet been

incinerated by a daylight-saving

time fireball from Indiana, e-mail

him at datherton@media.ucla.edu.

Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.