Tick tock. Tick tock. Time to change the clock.
Technically, you should have pushed your clocks ahead an hour before you went to sleep last night. But maybe you forgot because the feds asked us to “spring forward” three weeks earlier than usual.
The same Energy Policy Act passed back in 2005 in response to rising gasoline prices that gave us tax credits for hybrid vehicles and energy-efficient home improvements also changed the effective date for daylight saving time for the first time since 1986. (The “fall back” day moves back a week, to the first Sunday in November.)
The idea was that if more of our waking hours occur during daylight, we’ll gobble up less energy.
No word from the U.S. Department of Energy about how the extra hour of a.m. darkness affects consumption, but we do expect to expend a lot of energy grousing about the psychological effects of spending another month walking the dogs or running wearing a headlamp instead of a baseball cap.
The change has also given us a few other things to be cranky about:
Computers aren’t paying attention to the Congressional Register. Most computers are programmed to adjust for daylight saving time automatically on the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October. Unless you’re running Microsoft Vista, expect your Outlook calendaring function to be off by an hour until April 1 (funny, right?). If your computer is managed by an IT department, the problem has probably been corrected. If you are a home user, you’ll need to find a patch for Windows, or, if you’re an Apple user, accept the automatic software update for your operating system.
PDAs could be trouble, too. Most cellphones get their time adjusted when they communicate with their networks. But PC World magazine says PDAs, like BlackBerry and Treo phones, that run Outlook software will need help from the corporate tech department if you have it, or, if you’re an individual user, a patch from your service provider.
You might miss your shows. Cable and satellite boxes and their related digital video recorders have the same time problems that computers do, although since they’re constantly communicating with a network, they should have been updated automatically. The conventional VCR? Not so much. You’ll have to change your clock by hand, and then be prepared to do it again in November.
The bright spot in all this is that there is no law that says you have to observe daylight saving time. In fact Hawaii and Arizona, except for the Navajo Nation, decline to mess with their time. So if you feel like marching to the tick-tock of your own clock, be our guest.
