DST = Daylight Saving Time?

As you've probably heard Daylight Saving Time takes effect this Sunday morning (March 11) at 2:00 a.m. That of course means we will be "springing forward" or moving our clocks ahead by one hour.

Most years this involves losing an hour of sleep and some time to a ritual of running around setting the clocks in your house. And that's it, you're done. This year is different though for anyone with a computer.

This year Congress has changed the rules about when Daylight Saving Time starts and ends. I believe the goal was energy savings - using less lights and less heat.

In the past we could take for granted that our computers would know to change their clocks when Daylight Saving Time kicks in. But computers have to be told that Congress changed the rules. Springing Forward comes 3 weeks earlier this year. For the average home computer user you won't see much of a problem. You can get patches to update your computer or you can just change the time manually.

But folks who work in IT departments across the country are finding things are much more complicated for networked business computers. Every system we use must be checked to see if there is a patch or if some manual change is necessary. Patches provided (even by Microsoft) are unreliable and sometimes just plain don't work. I'm sure we will all hear stories on Monday of how people were affected when some big company's computer system didn't roll over the time correctly. Can you imagine if your airline's computers got off by an hour?

We won't know the full extent of issues until Monday when the business week begins. But a lot of IT staff are holding their breath this weekend that all goes well and any problems will be minimal. Some believe that DST should no longer stand for Daylight Saving Time but maybe "Darn Stupid Thing" or "Didn't Someone Think" before changing this law?

I remember the last time they changed the rules on Daylight Saving Time. And at first that made me wonder "what's the big deal? We've done this before." But it has been brought to my attention that the last time was 20 years ago when we as a society were much less dependent on computers.

In a few days it will all be over and I'm sure any problems will be quickly resolved. But Monday could be fun.