Time Changes In North America

For Canada, the US, and any country that follows Daylight Savings Time (DST), this year is gong to be tasking your consumer electronics, because of the changes: DST starts 3 weeks early this year (today, instead of April 1st).

If you forgot, we’ve already lost an hour as of today - Sun Mar 11, 2007. Here’s a quick guide to what might happen to any device you use to tell time. It’s not disastrous, but it will be a nuisance to some. Here are the four scenarios:

1. Manual, non-electronic.
   You’ll have to change your manual clocks ahead one hour now. Some time in November (as of this year, instead of Oct), you’ll fall back and gain an hour.

2. Manual, electronic.
   Same deal with any electronics gadgets that don’t update themselves.

3. Electronic, partial update.
   Most consumer electronics that have a clock which isn’t somehow synchronized with a service falls into this category - probably 95% or so  of devices not made recently. Pretty much, the device will not have updated for today. You’ll have to manual move the time forward one hour. Here’s the nuisance. When April 1st hits (around 2am), the device might move forward an extra hour because it’s programmed to do so. That means you’ll have to move back an hour manually. The same sort of problem will happen on the last Sunday in October, when the device might fall back an hour. But DST doesn’t end until the first Sunday in November this year, so you’ll have to move it forward manually after it changes, then fall back an hour in November.

4. Fully automatic.
   You have a very modern device that already knows about the changes to DST. It not only already sprung ahead an hour. This could be because you’ve got something like digital cable and your cable company is on top of things. They send a signal to your set-top box, which synchronizes the time accordingly. Some cellular providers may do this, too.

There are in-between scenarios. For example, my cellular provider sent me a text message on Friday about the change, and let me know that I could download some software for my Palm Treo 650.

So despite the crap you’ve been hearing in the media about this being as bad as Y2K, when consulting companies laughed their heads off and scored loads of contracts, it’s not. You just have to determine what scenario your devices fall into and fix them accordingly. The worst that’ll happen is that sometime this year, you may show up early or late for work. For companies… well, they probably have someone intelligent enough to change the time on their computers and punch clocks.