DST Disaster

Thank you Congress for rescuing us from the evils of morning sunshine, and thank you Microsoft for making server updates so quick and painless.

You bastards.

One wouldn’t think such a simple thing as an hour’s shift would cause huge problems, but the alleged Y2K Bug was nothing compared to this. As it happens, the IT industry is facing several different problems, ranging from banking apps and interest calculation to things like timeclocks and security systems. I thought maybe the areas not shifting would be laughing at the rest of us, but even they’re upset because they have to adjust to be aware of our changes. Canada and Bermuda have followed along with us, but word is the rest of the world is pissed off because again, they have to account for the differences, too.

At home I woke up in darkness. At first I accidentally set the clock early, but no, it was right, Congress just doesn’t have a brain. As predicted, we’re going to be turning lights on in the morning, thus negating the extra time the lights would have been off at night.

At work, though the patches were applied, some systems still couldn’t figure it out. I guess I should count myself lucky it wasn’t a lot worse — we didn’t lose any data and it’s not like it would bring classes to a halt if every server went offline — but one would imagine a simple patch to change timezone calculations would work without a hitch. Other schools in the area are having problems as well, and I’ve had a teacher tell me they applied the patch at home but it didn’t have any effect on their clock.

With luck the Congressional IT staff is having at least as many problems as we are. If this is just a trial and they change the time shift back to the original dates next year, I expect there will be armed rebellion.

In related news, I feel obligated to mention that may Linux machines running relatively current distributions updated themselves without a hitch. I have another teacher telling me he didn’t have to touch his Mac, and I have yet to see a Mac complaint on the school tech list I belong to.

Yet another entry in the “pro” column in the Reasons to Ditch Windows at Work. It’ll get extra checkmarks if Congress changes the dates back.

The worst part of it all is it might not be so bad if it would actually have gained us anything. By most accounts, all the date shift has done is cost companies money because of IT staff overtime and extra development costs.