Blackmoor Vituperative

Although nobody’s crystal ball is clear on the impact that the change in the daylight-saving time rules will have on enterprise IT systems and applications, the problems could be bigger than most people realize.

That’s because IT shops have had less notice in dealing with the time change than they did for Y2K, and because the issue doesn’t have visibility at the highest levels of an organization as it did for Y2K.

“We are likely to see more issues than we did with Y2K because there is no visibility at the board and the CEO level, yet it’s a similar risk to the business,” said Tim Howes, CTO at data center provisioning provider Opsware in Sunnyvale, CA.

“Only server administrators and application support teams know what could happen if time stamps get misaligned. A lot of these administrators are sweating bullets right now,” said Swapnil Shah, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at mValent, a configuration and change management provider in Burlington, Mass.

(from eWeek, Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?)

So-called “daylight-saving time” is a colossal waste of time and money. How many millions of man-hours are squandered on this madness? How much productivity is lost, not just due to the foolish exercise of re-setting everything with a clock in it, but from the missed appointments and conflicted schedules that invariably result? How many people die needlessly in car accidents because a driver got too little sleep due to damnable “daylight-saving time”?

In fact, our societal sleep debt is so great that simply losing one additional hour of sleep due to the spring shift to daylight savings time can increase traffic accident rates by 7% (Coren, 1996b) and death rates due to all accidents by 6.5% (Coren, 1996c).

(from Psychiatric Times, Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency)

People die as a result of this nonsense. They DIE. More importantly, it’s an inconvenience to me, personally. So it’s time to do something about it.

Write your senators and representatives about this. A simple letter or email from enough people will get their attention. Just tell them you want to STOP re-setting all of your clocks and disrupting your sleep patterns twice a year.

Here is how you can contact your congress people:

Contacting the Congress
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/
Congressional Email Directory

You might also refer them to http://www.standardtime.com/.