By now you are well aware that daylight savings time (DST) was adjusted by the 2005 energy bill put forth by the US Congress.    If you’re not aware, you may need to check your clocks.  This act mandated a change in the usual DST dates in 2007 in order to “save energy” by utilizing daylight.  This came about from a study that showed DST reduced American consumption of oil by about 100,000 barrels daily.  Congress decided that (in 3 paragraphs worth of explanation) they would help the world become a better place to live by capitalizing on these “savings.”

Let me just say, congressmen and women - DUMB MOVE.

I applaud the thought that doing something this simple could save oil and help the environment.  Yes, indeed, this all looked good on paper.  Apparently, no one remembered that this would also make the morning darker, requiring people to simply replace the amount of time spent with the lights on at night with more lights on in the morning.  Forget the fact that it is estimated this change cost American industry $2 billion to fix nearly every computer system out there.  It seems our friends in congress forgot about our old friend Y2K.

So thank you, thank you for handing a 2 billion dollar expense to our high-tech industry which will in turn be handed down to consumers like me.  Thank you for creating a myriad of headaches among the IT workforce which probably consumed more than 100,000 barrels of fuel per day just keeping the lights/computers on to think about this problem.  Thank you for forcing me read countless emails about how this or that upgrade needs to be done to fix the DST change issue.  Thank you for forcing me to check all of my devices, computers, and calendar appointments for proper rollovers.  Most of all, thank you for giving these two PhD. students in economics something to write a thesis on which proves that all you did was tick a lot of people off:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=2938715