The day we lost half an hour

My first entry into the Singapore Memory site:

The year we followed West Malaysia into GMT +8:00 was the year I started secondary school.

We had until then been happily existing at GMT +7:30 when the government of Malaysia suddenly decided it would be a really good idea if both West and East Malaysia shared the same time zone.

I remember news reports of school children complaining that they now had to wait for school buses in the dark – as the sun had not yet risen at that (half) hour – and of some other school children who turned up half hour late for school on 2 Jan 1982, because somehow, they had not heard about the time zone change.