Clocks go back: 3:00 becomes 2:00 and an extra hour appears

The clock change hands out 60 minutes and the forum debates how to spend them

At 3:00 tonight the clock will go back to 2:00. It's the clock change and the return to winter time, and on paper a gift of time: sixty extra minutes. The immediate question isn't metaphysical. It's knowing what to do with them. Because a loose hour, with no instructions for use, is a strange object: in the forum, everyone has a suggestion for what to do with it.

Can you buy something at 3:00 and return it at 2:50?

There's no time travel, however much the calendar allows it. One forum member has considered the experiment: buying online at 3:00 and returning the item at 2:50 the same day to see what movement shows up in the account. The answer is that the order holds. Banks, shops and servers store the time in UTC, the universal reference that never moves, and only translate it to local time when displaying it on screen. So even though the local hour repeats, transactions stay in the correct order.

The risk lies elsewhere: in poorly built systems. The repeated stretch —from 2:00 to 3:00— is the classic time zone trap. A program that stores local time without a time zone may not be able to tell the two 2:37s apart.

Sleeping an extra hour doesn't always come free

Sleep is the most common answer. Some warn it doesn't always come free: at certain ages you don't sleep an extra hour, you simply wake up an hour earlier. You wake earlier, with the house in silence, and have spent hours tossing and turning.

Then morning comes, and it stretches on for no apparent reason: as one forum member put it, even the dogs are still asleep and you get the feeling of having gained a day that is really just an hour. For those who sleep until they're proge, none of this matters. For everyone else, the extra hour becomes a debt that never gets collected.