New Time or Old Time?

Every westerner with a blog in Morocco has I’m sure posted exactly this same entry sometime in the last two weeks. The last two years, Morocco has started doing a summer time-change for the same reason most other countries do it: to save a lot of money in electricity bills. The difference in Morocco is that this time change seems to be optional. Probably close to 50% of people I interact with have changed their clocks, while the other half are still operating on “old time”. This of course doesn’t make sense at all to me, as it seems a lot easier to take the ten seconds and move the hand on the clock, than to spend all summer having to clarify whether a quoted time is in “old time” or “new time.” I hear there are entire towns that have just decided not to switch to new time, including the whole old medina in Fes and other big cities. The first couple of days it was funny to have to clarify new time or old time, but now, two weeks after the time change, it’s just annoying and I’m almost looking forward to Ramadan (when the time will change back) just so the country can all be on the same time again. My neighbors, for example, are on old time while I’ve switched to new time. They don’t work in an office or take scheduled public transportation or have meetings, so they just don’t see the need to change their clock. I wonder whether America had this problem when we first started changing the clocks, whenever that was. And how many years it'll take for Morocco to accept and acknowledge the concept of daylight savings. I'm not holding my breath.