Your Government At Work, Metro Edition

As you may know, last weekend was "spring forward" time, when we "lose" an hour of sleep. At 2am, we advanced our clocks to 3am.

Of course, if you were awake during that time, nothing really happens. Your late-night TV movie doesn't skip an hour, you aren't suddenly one hour hungrier, your homework isn't one more hour done. It's a totally non-physical phenomena.

That is, unless you are the Government. To the Government, that missing hour makes all the difference in the world. Imagine you are going down to party with some friends in Georgetown. You take metro, like a good citizen, because your partying until 2am, and metro is open until 3am, so there's plenty of time to get home.

There you are, and the time is getting late. 1am, 130am, 150am. Around 2am, they are ready to close the bar, and you are off to the Metro to get back to your car. Except that Metro is closed.

Because you see, Metro closes at 3am. Normally, that's 3 hours after midnight. But it's "spring forward time", and 2am is 3am. So they obviously have to do SOMETHING, right? Now for normal folks, the obvious thing is to change your closing time to 4am. After all, people will still be partying until 2am, and will still need to drive home. Nobody says "hey, we lose an hour, so we'll quit the party an hour earlier". They say "hey, we'll sleep in an hour".

But that's not how Government works. To government, 3am is 3am, and if for some reason 1:59:59 is followed by 3am, then the right thing to do is to close an hour early.

The only question is, when they punched out, did their timecards say 3am, and did they get paid for the hour.

, noting that they close at 3am (and not 3 hours after midnight), decided that since 2am was really 3a