TURN BACK THE HANDS OF TIME

Most of us will be asleep tonight when 2 a.m. magically becomes 1 a.m. and an extra hour of sleep makes everything seem right with the world.

But to many who work graveyard shifts, the return to Central Standard Time means extra work.

Procter & Gamble operates two shifts of 12 hours each. At the fall time change, the 200 people on the second shift work 13 hours, says Larry Stahlman, P&G's public affairs manager. When the clocks move forward an hour in the spring, the team works 11 hours.

At Schnucks, the late shift gets an hour of overtime for the extra time the employees put in, says Jenny Briscoe, the company's paymaster. Anyone on the clock at Wal-Mart tonight is getting paid for an extra hour, too.

Cape Girardeau Police Department officers working the midnight shift get an hour of overtime. Sgt. Carl Kinnison said the time change can be confusing when calls are logged in tonight during the second hour that begins at 1 p.m.

"We have to make sure the computer time clock is adjusted to standard time," he said.

Fire departments, where there's also an extra hour to spend tonight, issue reminders that the time change is a good time to check home smoke alarms and change batteries.

Whether in spring or fall, the changing of the clocks is bad for business in the churches. "When it goes on or off daylight-saving time, church attendance goes down," said the Rev. Ron Watts, senior pastor at La Croix United Methodist Church.

Watts understands why people might forget to set their clocks and oversleep in the spring. But he can't explain the drop in church attendance that occurs every last weekend in October even though the congregation has an extra hour to get to church.

"Generally, there's as much as a 5-10 percent dip," said Watts, adding that the drop in attendance is at least smaller in the fall.

"It definitely doesn't go up," he said.

Resetting the nine mantle clocks and one grandfather clock in his home twice a year takes awhile even for clock repairman David Sander. One clock cannot be set backward, so Sander either moves it ahead 11 hours or stops the pendulum for an hour.

That sounds simple but Sander gets a bit more business at this time of year from people don't know how to reset their clocks.

Sander would know how because he's been repairing clocks for 50 years.

Roger Lang of Lang Jewelers says 10 to 12 people a day come by to have their watches reset when the time changes.

The change doesn't upset travel schedules because computers take the shift into account, AAA's Jane Harte says.

Flight times that involve Phoenix could be confusing, she said, because Phoenix never switches to daylight-saving time.

TWA spokesman Don Walker says 90 percent of the 25 million people who fly his airline annually are crossing time zones. "Flying is confusing anyway," he said.