As I blogged about earlier, the Commonwealth Games were recently held in Melbourne. Unfortunately, the Games were scheduled right when Australia was due to switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. Anticipating the trouble this would cause for athletes and spectators, some asshats in Australian government decided to delay the switch to Standard Time by a week. As you can imagine, this ill-conceived decision has caused no shortage of confusion. Sure, there was no trouble getting people to the Games, but now no one really knows what time it is.
I got bitten by this yesterday morning. My hotel phone is a combination phone/clock radio. I asked the hotel staff to fix the phone as there was a short in the line which caused static. The maintenance guy dutifully came by and fixed things, namely by completely replacing the clock/phone. The only problem is that he set the time to be an hour earlier than it was (at least, what I think it was. Who knows?). Thus, I awoke an hour later than expected and was an hour late getting to the trade show.
I updated the clock to match the time posted on an Australian government website and raced out to the show. I was grumbling about the clock thing all day until I woke this morning. Though my clock said 6 AM, the radio announcer kept saying 5 AM.
Houston, we have a problem. (Houston, by the way, is currently observing CST.)
Great! Either the announcer or the clock is wrong. My laptop’s time is still in EST, so that’s no help. I turned on the TV to see what the Australian TV networks were saying. Sure enough, they said it was 6 AM, too. The radio guy was wrong.
I decided to cut the hotel maintenance guy some slack. In this crazy environment no one can possibly agree on the time!
All this trouble doesn’t even begin to address the problems with all of our modern society’s computers, several of which were stuck in one time or another. Microsoft released a patch to tell Windows servers to follow the new delayed switch rule, but the big drawback is the need to remove the patch before next year. How much you want to bet that at least fifty percent of computer owners forget to do that?
Perhaps this is a reminder from the Universe that Time is not real. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that I may be late for breakfast now.
Or not.