Spring Forward and Miss a Meeting

When April 2 rolls around, most Americans will set clocks an hour forward, lament the prospect of less sleep, and take comfort in the promise of longer evening light.

In Indiana, however, IT workers will be awaiting potential disaster.

Starting in April, residents of Indiana — the state notorious for its complex approach to setting time — will begin observing daylight-saving time. The move is a welcome step for residents of some of the state’s eastern counties, who have long unofficially followed daylight-saving time.

But IT staff at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, fear the change will create complications galore.

“This is like Y2K except this one is really happening,” said university IT spokesman Steve Tally.

With a nationwide shift in daylight-saving scheduling slated for next year, Indiana’s experience offers a preview of potential glitches in store for the rest of the country. Starting in 2007, daylight-saving time will begin on the second Sunday of March rather than the first Sunday in April, as it does today. Daylight-saving time will end the first Sunday of November, a week later than it does now.



  1. gquaglia says:

    Day light savings time is stupid. It fucks up our bodies and creates nothing but problems. All for 1 extra hour of light. Not worth it.

  2. Brett says:

    “This is like Y2K except this one is really happening,” said university IT spokesman Steve Tally.

    Yes, just like it, except that the worst likely to happen here is things are off by an hour or so for a bit not crashed or off by a century. Otherwise, just like it.

  3. Mick Dermitt says:

    Stock up on bottled water.
    Have duck tape on hand.
    Maybe the new digital gasoline pumps will go back to pre-Bush Y2K levels. We couldn’t be that lucky.

  4. Eideard says:

    How do you explain DST to people who think the Earth is flat?

  5. Ryan Vande Water says:

    From TFA: “the state notorious for its complex approach to setting time”

    Umm…. it’s not really all that complex:

    1. In the spring, you leave your clock alone.
    2. Then, in the fall, you leave your clock alone.

    Arizona does it too… or did.

    Ryan

  6. blank says:

    I have to chime in here also. How stupid is it to set our clocks ahead an hour during the summers? Just leave it alone!

    All you kids messing with the space-time continuum will screw it up for the rest of us…you mark my words!

  7. Chuck says:

    I work IT in Indiana, and this is a logistical nightmare. I’ve spent the past 2 weeks working doubles fixing everybody’s Outlook Calendars. See, when you schedule an appointment in Outlook, it schedules it in your current Time Zone. When you change the Time Zone to observe DST, all appointments that fall in the DST period are incorrectly shifted one hour forward. It’s a “Feature” of Outlook. The only solution (via Microsoft KB) is to export all calendar entries to csv files (csv drops the Time Zone field), change the Time Zone, and import them back, but this breaks re-occurring appointments, turning them into single-instance appointments. Wheeeeee!

  8. Don says:

    Arizona still does, Ryan (except on the Navajo reservation). And, yeah, what’s so complex about doing nothing? I hate daylight savings. It hits me like jet lag the day after (should be a national holiday on both ends of daylight savings!). It also helped put the drive-in movies out of business.

  9. Mike T says:

    I live in Indiana (pray for me on that alone) and I can assure you that you should NOT listen to Ryan – I know him very well since he sits right outside my office! 🙂 He is what’s wrong with this purgatory of a state.

    I don’t really care if DST is done or not…but one state (or two) can’t go their own way when the rest of the country is doing something else. It creates too much confusion. If we are going to kill DST, then the whole country should kill it. The biggest mistake the feds made was when they let states opt out — all or none.

    And everyone in this state that is saying how hard this is going to be has had ONE YEAR to get ready for it. If they are just now getting to this, then they deserve every problem they have.

    And further, since Ryan works for me, he should get back to work and quit surfing Dvorak.org/blog.

    Mike T

  10. rus62 says:

    Now Indiana is moving 8 counties to the Central Time Zone. Those counties will in effect not have to change their clocks until fall.

  11. bac says:

    I used to live in Indiana, which I now live in Florida. My home town, Washington, is about 25 – 30 miles east of the western border to Illinois. Evansville does follow the DST plan. Viewing TV shows broadast by TV stations located in Evansville would shift by an hour. So I had to constantly change my VCR setting for certain shows. College students from Illinois attending Vincennes University had to make adjustments in order to get to their classes on time. My relatives that still live in Indiana sometimes forget about DST and phone me at late hours. May be now some of the annoyances will go away.

  12. Canada Drew says:

    Saskatchewan (Canada) also follows the complexity in eloquently detailed in #5 (great job, Ryan).

    For years different community “leaders” have been trying to get DST implemented there. With all the bullshit in our daily lives these days, why don’t we all just forget about this DST anyway (hands up – how many of you spend this extra hour of daylight in your car commuting during a setting sun 5 out of 7 days a week anyway?)

  13. Felicia Heartsong says:

    I have recently purchased several clocks that automatically switch between Daylight/Standard time… How do I reprogram them with these new dates?

  14. Chuck says:

    @ #13:

    Well, unless your clocks can download a patch, I’d say buy new clocks.

  15. Ryan Vande Water says:

    Felicia, here is your reprogramming algorithm.

    1. Dispose of the clocks you just bought.
    2. Move to Arizona.

    Ryan

    PS Mike_T eats poo.

  16. Esteban says:

    Am I the only one here who likes Daylight Savings time? That extra hour of sunlight at night is worth a week of messed-up sleep every two months. I’m actually jealous that I don’t get daylight savings time in my current home of American Samoa. But since we’re the only part of the U.S. south of the equator, it wouldn’t make sense to have daylight savings in the winter months of June, July and August.

  17. Mr. Fusion says:

    Estaban

    Yes.

    Living in Indiana, the standardization to put the state on one time zone has been a constant battle. It was put forward a dozen times over 20 years before finally being accepted. Our lovely Governor, Mitch Danials, who many might remember as Bush’s Budget Director before running for Governor, convinced the Republican Legislature to put the state in the Eastern Time zone.

    The federal Department of Transportation is in charge of time zones. They turned around and made each county write a proposal justifying which time zone they wanted to be in. My county is small and poor. It cost over $100,000 to write our proposal. Most of the county was happy with the status quo or just didn’t care.

    Finally the DOT announced on a county by county basis who is in what time zone. Now the state is a hodge podge of timezones with little reasoning behind it. We are now Central, but just 10 miles east is Eastern. We are more economically geared to the east. School children will be waiting for the bus much more in the dark.

    There is one rural county that can’t make up their minds as to what time zone to be in. The DoT made them Central so the County Commissioners said no way, we are going Eastern. Then the Washington big boys told the commissioners they would go to jail if they didn’t make the official time Central. To compromise, the whole county is now on what they call “Commercial Time”. All county offices, Courthouse, schools, and most businesses will open and close an hour earlier. Only the Post Office will open and close as if nothing has happened. This county too is economically geared to it’s east.

    The Governor was elected with the slogan “Our Man Mitch”. Now there is a proliferation of bumper stickers “Pitch Mitch”.

  18. Mr. Fusion says:

    And please don’t send any sundials. The normal division between Eastern and Central Time zones is somewhere in Ohio, east of the Indiana State line. Sundials would only confuse us more.

  19. joshua says:

    I was born and raised in Arizona, we still don’t have DST.

    When I came home from University to have my surhury, my parents had moved to their new home in Northern California. I can’t get my watch set to DST, I lost the instruction book years ago, after all, we didn’t need to know how to do that in Arizona.

    I”l be so glad when we move foreward an hour on Sunday, then I won’t be early for everything.

  20. grangergamer says:

    I live in Indiana and I have never changed a clock for Daylight Savings Time, and I’m fine with it. I don’t really think it’s worth it for one hour, it’s ok not having to change clocks. Screw one hour of daylight!

  21. joshua says:

    this was originally a farm thing anyway. Couldn’t have the little tykes walking to school 6 miles in the dark, in snow 5 foot deep, up hill both ways.

  22. Max Exter says:

    I use computers. Sunlight is the bane of my existence! I say we shift the clocks 6 hours in the opposite direction in March. That way, I can wake up emersed in my precious darkness. Precious…

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