Countdown to Confusion Daylight Saving Time Comes Early This Year, But Will Your Computer Know When to Switch?
By Charles Babington and Tomoeh Murakami Tse Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, March 3, 2007; D01
Perhaps the worst that will happen in millions of offices on the second Monday in March is that caffeine-deprived workers will wonder why their automatic coffeemakers failed to perk on schedule. In less lucky workplaces, however, employees might miss meetings, overbook conference rooms or inaccurately record the time or date of important financial transactions.
For the first time in 20 years, daylight saving time will not start on the first Sunday in April. Instead, it will begin three weeks earlier, at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March, the 11th.
Devices from the tiniest BlackBerry to the largest mainframe computer must be updated to ensure their internal clocks "spring forward" by one hour at the right moment rather than on the old date, which has been written into countless programs. Similarly, they must be reprogrammed to revert to standard time a week later than usual, on Nov. 4. Congress decided in 2005 to expand daylight saving time by four weeks, starting this year, in hopes of conserving energy by pushing more human activity into sunlit hours.