Blackmoor Vituperative

While corporate IT departments spent countless hours and dollars updating IT systems for the March 11 move to daylight-saving time (DST) in the U.S., the largest cost of the time change to companies involves business meetings — some of which are still susceptible to DST-related scheduling errors.

[…]

“The biggest cost is the hidden cost of confusion over the time of meetings,” Ferris wrote in a subscribers-only Web bulletin yesterday. “Almost everyone involved with U.S./Canada meetings will miss some, or show up prematurely.” Those missed connections waste an average of half an hour to one hour per person, he said, and with about 100 million electronically connected workers in the U.S., that will cost about $3 billion in lost productivity.

“A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” he said.

(from Computer World, The corporate cost of DST? $3B, says analyst)

This doesn’t even begin to approach the real cost, factoring in the time wasted by normal people in their everyday lives, running around fiddling with clocks, missing appointments, and so on. Why, on my personal laptop (which still runs Windows — Windows XP Pro, to be exact), the time change required a patch from Microsoft which played hell with my calendar, turning around 1000 appointents and scheduled items into two-day events.

It would be very easy to blame Microsoft for that. Hell, it’s not like they haven’t done enough things worth blaming them for. But this wasn’t their fault. There should have been no need for that patch, because there was no need to fiddle with the time to begin with. So, on top of the hour or so that it took me to straighten out my calendar (and I’m not the only one, by the way — this was a pretty widespread problem), how much did Microsoft and other companies spend to patch and update software just to comply with this idiotic, useless, and completely arbitrary change in the display of our clocks? And that’s just one way this absurd Daylight “Saving” Time fiasco costs us all time and money.