A Glitch in Time?

REMEMBER TO SET YOUR CLOCKS FORWARD this weekend. On Sunday. At or before 2 a.m.

Daylight saving time is springing forward itself this year, starting in March instead of its usual April, and lots of folks can't wait to tell us about it. Newspapers, television stations, radio stations, blogs — even our cell phone company has joined in, sending us both text-message and voicemail reminders to update our PDA to keep pandemonium at bay.

The change seems simple enough. In 2005, Congress decided to lengthen daylight time by four weeks in a provision tucked inside an energy efficiency bill. So all we need to do is remember to set our clocks forward. By one hour. Not hard, right?

Wrong, says the overworked tech crowd. The daylight-saving switch has meant making manual changes to computers and servers and the like — anything that stores date data — because they're all set to change over to daylight time in April instead of March. Come Monday morning, if somebody doesn't do something about it, your PDA or edition of Microsoft Outlook won't tell you it's time for that 11 a.m. meeting until noon. And that kind of problem carries even greater weight at places like airlines and banks. Where, let's hope, serious people are paying attention to the problem and taking swift action.

For the rest of us, though, the time change is just an item on our to-do list. But plenty of people think we're not quite up to the job. Take, for instance, a few items e-mailed to us this week by PR types looking to pitch stories.

"Believe it or not, Daylight Savings Time is just two days away. Because it is 3 weeks earlier than before, there is great confusion; both among people and their computers and gadgets," one PR professional posited, quoting his boss as saying the time change "will not be the end of the world, but it's certainly [a] nuisance people can't afford to ignore."

"Count on being late March 11," one e-mail headline warned. Said its text:

This year daylight savings comes early and you can count on being late if you use your trusty cell phone for your clock. Do we have another Y2K situation on our hands?

If by "Y2K situation" the writer means "period of Chicken Little-style fretting followed by nothing bad happening," then yes, we do.

Perhaps if we each do our part, we can weather this clock crisis together. Will we make it? Will our society crumble into disorder and anarchy? Only time (sigh) will tell.

Posted By Greg Barber at 3:14 PM on March 9, 2007 Tagged in Free Ride

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