Three Daylight Savings Time follies

As you know, Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the United States was changed by an act of Congress, so that it starts earlier this year. For me personally, it’s been a bigger nuisance than Y2K (which wasn’t a nuisance at all).

Here are three personal anecdotes:

1. On Sunday morning, I used my Garmin StreetPilot c550 to get to a friend’s house. (They live in a maze in Foster City, Calif.) I noted that the time was incorrect on the GPS. Today, on the Garmin Web site, I saw that on March 8 the company posted a firmware patch. So, in addition to the numerous software patches for my Windows and Mac computers, I also need to patch my GPS.

2. On Sunday night, I flew on the red-eye from San Francisco to New York City. All the clocks inside the United airlines lounge at SFO were wrong. Every few minutes, an announcer came over the public address system to remind everyone that the correct time was one hour later than shown on the clocks.

3. This afternoon, I was scheduled to have a conference call with a company at 4:00 pm Eastern time. I called into their bridge line – and was told that the passcode was invalid. I emailed the guy who set up the conference, and he replied saying that the combination of their Exchange Server group calendar and the Cisco Unified MeetingPlace software that schedules their phone bridges messed up. Although Exchange correctly adjusted the meeting times for DST, the MeetingPlace software didn’t sync with those adjustments. Therefore, Exchange knew the meeting was at 4:00 pm, but MeetingPlace set up the phone bridge to activate at 3:00 pm. The solution: He had to delete all future meetings set up with the MeetingPlace phone bridge and re-schedule them, in order for the system to work correctly.

Think about all the productivity wasted, and all the hard and soft costs, of this change to Daylight Savings Time. It’s hard to believe that the potential benefits (in theory, reduced energy consumption), is worth the inconvenience and expense that this has caused.

Please share your DST horror stories, large or small… and whether you see any benefit at all to the DST change, or to DST at all.