From A DST-ance

Part of why I received 111 email messages at work during my time off — an unusually high number for me — was that our IT finally got around to pushing software updates, and therefore corresponding meeting re-invites, to accomodate this year's revised start for daylight-saving time a.k.a "Y2K7." (This would be what has caused Cola Boy to work weekends, and almost MiKell, who called it BabyY2K.)

All this last-minute scrambling would seem to imply that the date change was new and that no one anticipated the impact. In fact, our local paper trumpeted a headline that read, in part, that one should blame Congress if one is late for anything in the next two weeks.

Forgive me, but: hogwash.

In my opinion, three things are to blame:

1. Lack of short-term historical memory: The last time the start of daylight-saving time was moved was in 1985-1987. It has not been this way since time immemorial. The initial releases of both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows predate this — meaning to me that this has been encountered before within even the average system-level programmer's lifetime.
    
2. Lack of a sense of urgency: Microsoft released their big patch the second week of February, with less than four weeks to go. Our IT department pushed the patches with less than ten days to go, never mind that a lot of us plan our calendars just a bit farther out than that. From these lead times, you might think it was a last-minute decision to move the date. Wrong. The Shrub signed this into law Aug. 8, 2005. That's 19 months ago, folks. Now, I'm no programmer, but I'd venture far enough to say that perhaps any product released since, say, March 2006 should have had some sort of consideration embedded to account for a variable start to daylight-saving time. Instead, industry seems to have treated it as a "we'll get to it when we can"-priority item — and we're paying for it now.
    
3. The nature of capitalism: The cynic in me wonders if any part of this was a "planned obsolesence" strategy. Really want to have your VCR update itself? Buy a new one — or better yet, buy a new DVD Recorder or DVR. Windows 2000 and Mac OS X older than 10.3.9 — both still supported by their respective companies — won't udpate? Time to upgrade to Vista or Mac OS X Tiger. What — your computer's too old to upgrade your OS? What better time to upgrade your whole system!

(I'll ignore for the moment how so-called "standard" time now lasts a mere 1/3 of the year — or how, from a purely geographic standpoint — Orlando almost belongs in Central Time, not Eastern, to begin with. Or, how I've often heard tell that pushing the end of daylight-saving time one week later is something the candy-manufacturing industry has been pushing for, for years, so DST will end after their biggest sales-day of the year: Halloween.)

But wait, there's more! The energy-related bill included provisions for a study to see if moving the start of daylight-saving time actually saved energy. If things are proved otherwise, Congress could always amend the amendment, and move the dates of DST yet again.

But, barring another such act of Congress — literally — we shouldn't have to deal with time-related issues again for another 31 years.

A side note: the most entertaining part of this was the memo from our head IT honcho, advising the patching process would occur after 5 p.m. PDT, Feb. 28. "PDT" is the abbreviation for "Pacific Daylight Time," which, as we clearly know, didn't start quite as early as Feb. 28.