Serendipity35

This seemingly "sudden" plan to spring ahead earlier than expected into Daylight Savings Time at 2 A.M. reminds me of all the hoopla over Y2K back in 2000. That started 3 years before the event, so in the end it was a whimper instead of a bang. Still,plenty of media coverage, books and fix it programs and companies spending big bucks to get ready.

The obvious fears this time are still financial systems, cell phone systems, airline schedules and such and the odds are excellent that these big companies have done what they need to do. Windows Vista will do a self-fix and if you have XP or a Mac and you have auto update turned on, they will do the update automatically. The NJIT tech staff recommended downloading its "Outlook TimeZone Update Tool" if you use your computer's Outlook calendar.. I went to the MS site and couldn't find it, so if I'm late to any meetings Monday morning, that's my excuse.

I got an email from Palm telling me to update a fix for my PDA. I'm sure its the same with a Blackberry & the rest of our techtoys. But the last time I did a Palm update, the whole unit got messed up, so I will probably just go in & fix the clock - like I will do to my microwave, clock radio, car clocks, watch and the multitude of "clocks" hiding in my life.

With my Verizon cell phone (an antique because I am not a fan of cell phone technology), if I dial *228, the phone gets its firmware updated and that will fix it if it wasn't automatically reset as soon as I logged on to contact a cell tower.

So this little glitch forced us to to temporarily redirect tech support and that costs time and money. A Forrester analysis estimated that a medium to large corporate tech department has probably commissioned two to four people to fix the glitch, and that with 2 weeks of work it would mean about $50,000 in labor costs. (Obviously they get paid better than our university tech crew.)

What if we don't find any substantial energy savings from the time change? Then Congress can switch back and we can do the tech changes all over again.

I know that Hawaii & Alaska get to ignore all this, but what happens when they interact with the rest of us? Why does my friend Steve get to ignore DST in Arizona? Where are the instructions that came with my digital watch that has all those buttons?