Sunday, April 01, 2007

My DST Nightmare

I had to be somewhere this morning at 9:00. It would take a little over an an hour to get there, so I figured I better leave by 7:30 just to be safe. That meant setting the alarm clock to 6:45.

6:45 came and the alarm went off as expected. I jumped into the shower, got dressed, and as I was heading out the door my wife says "Where are you going so early?" I told her and she rolled back over and went back to sleep.

Then I jumped into a car I usually don't drive. "Hmm, the clock says 6:32", I thought to myself, "must be I haven't driven this car for three weeks."

I reset the clock to the correct time and was off.

I got to my destination at 8:50 and there were only a couple people there. I was expecting about 60 or 70!

I approached the guy in charge and said "I must have read they flyer wrong..."

"Oh, that's today, but starts at 9:00" he says.

I looked at my phone and it said 7:50. 7:50, WTF?

Ah, yes, Daylight Savings Time. Not the "new" Daylight Savings Time, but the "old" Daylight Savings Time.

I have one of those "fancy" clocks that automatically adjusts for Daylight Savings Time. Except, I got it a couple years ago and it still thinks that the first Sunday in April is the right time to "spring forward".

Sure enough, I got home and my clock was an hour ahead of everything else. I promptly went back down to the car and reset the clock. Interestingly enough, my W2K box that was supposed to be patched with all the latest updates was also an hour ahead.

3 comments:

Joel Garry said...

Oh man, some places the phone clocks get confused. How would you like to screw up a job interview?

Pete Scott said...

And guess who got called out at 4AM on Sunday morning after some kind soul at a global IT company (three letter named) kindly changed the system to use autochange to DST - which was wrong as
1) it is in the middle of our ETL period,
2) the UK changed to DST last weekend,
3) they did not tell anyone
3b) they did not raise change control
3c) they did not test it
4) I have a cold

Anonymous said...

This is why I love my reliable automatic watch