Spring Forward, Fall Back

This weekend we celebrate one of America's most favored of traditions, Daylight Savings Time. Now some of the astute of you out there may be wondering why we are celebrating it nearly three weeks ahead of time this year. Well, the simple answer is that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to test us and the country in sort of a grand experiment. What is this experiment? Well, they figure that by moving the actual date of daylight savings to the middle of March from April 1st will mean bigger cost savings in the long run since we don't have to burn up as much power due to the longer duration of day. The theory certainly seems to make sense and if it works out, I certainly hope that it means that I spend less on my electricity this year. At least one added benefit for those of us who work long hours, we'll at least get a moderate amount of sun in our daily routine. At the very least, it should make for some interesting occurrences; in fact we are already starting to see some.

When I first started working after graduating college, I landed a job in Virginia; more precisely in Springfield, Virginia. Now for those of you who live around the DC metro area, that springs up images of horrendous traffic, accidents, overpasses, the works. I happened to be commuting around there at the start of the massive construction project that is only now nearing semi-completion after decades of work. Anyways, due to the fact that I had such a bad commute, I used to get up early so that I could leave early from work and get through the traffic in the afternoon. So I began getting up earlier and earlier until I found that magic moment in time where I would be able to leave and miss most of the traffic. That happy hour for me became 4:30. I would get up every morning at 4:30 and be at work by 6:00 or 6:30. On those days, I would never see the sun in the morning and by the time I got around to leaving, especially in the winter, the sun was already on it's way out.

Although I don't enjoy sunbathing and the like, it was still somewhat depressing to miss out on the sun completely. It's a sad state of affairs when your only source of light is a humming and buzzing florescent bulb. In the interim my job and job location has changed but this new daylight savings time is also helping to ease my sun deficiency. Being able to see the sun is a nice thing and it definitely helps get the day started off on the right foot. That being the case, I don't understand why some people appear to be making this experiment by Congress appear to be the worst technical disaster since the Y2K build-up. I'm sure the Europeans are getting a kick out of all this; but then again, the Europeans tend to chuckle at nearly anything we Americans do.

What is the hubbub about? Well, it seems that in this modern and technosavy society we live in, not all of our techno-devices are prepared for the early implementation of daylight savings time. For example, although newer versions of Windows are ready for the changeover, older versions need to be patched. Now having been in situations where I need to patch an older operating system, I know how aggravating it can be. Plus, as your operating system gets older and older, tech support becomes harder to find. Okay, that's one thing, but what about our cell phones and all. Well, the date and time is all fed to most of them from the service providers, so hopefully your particular service provider will be able to keep things in order for your to be able to keep chatting away on the cell phone. But what about the one invention whose existence has meant so much more to TV watching addicts than anything else? TiVO?

According to TiVO executives, the system should have been automatically updated at the time of the last automatic patch that is sent out through the network. However, they do caveat this by saying that older units may not receive the patch correctly so you may end up watching something else when you TiVO it. This simple fact seems to have caused such great concern that people all over the place can talk about little else. It's strikes me as being a bit backward when we attempt to give people more daylight by artificially changing time and people react by saying I can't record all of the TV shows that I want. It's a conundrum inside an enigma inside a puzzle. It's almost like the chicken and egg dilemma. What comes first? Longer days or more TV. Truly, are we springing forward or falling backward?