I grew up in Indiana where, until a recent bout of legislative insanity, there was no need to change the clocks twice a year.
Ironically, to me, that has led to many people saying to me, with a straight face and in all seriousness, “Indiana is so weird – they don’t move their clocks.” As if the idea of moving the hours in the day while trying to remember “spring forward, fall back” was something other than weird.
Well, in the latest illustration of the law of unintended consequences, there is a growing concern that new legislation changing the dates of daylight savings time may cause all kinds of technological problems that are reminiscent of the famous Y2K problem.
FindLaw published an AP story today called “Longer daylight saving could trigger tech trouble,” which sketches out the potential problems and leads me to suspect that the costs of dealing with these nagging little problems will probably cost us more than the intended energy cost savings of making the change.
Pull those Y2K strategic plans off the shelf, dust them off and prepare for a new tech distraction, courtesy of our well-meaning, but sometimes impetuous, legislators.
The money quote from the article, you ask? Here it is:
“Missiles won’t be launching but it’s still going to cause a lot of hassle,” he said.
And a bonus money quote:
“It is unfortunately going to add a little bit of complexity to consumers,” said Reid Sullivan, vice president of the entertainment group at Panasonic Consumer Electronics Co. “In some cases, depending on the product, they may have to manually increase or decrease the time.”
Yes, he did say manually.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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