Here is my Daylight Saving Time tale of woe. I use my cell phone as an alarm clock. It gets its time from the cell tower. As of last night, it had not yet switched over to Eastern Daylight Time. So, I left alone alarm #1 — a recurring alarm set for 5:10 a.m. and set alarm #2 for 4:10 a.m. (which is the equivalent of 5:10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time). Sure enough, the cell tower caught up over night and so my 4:10 alarm went off an hour earlier than I wanted to get up. I was cognizant of the possibility, so when that alarm went off, I checked another clock, verified that it was only 4:10, and went back to sleep.
But, it took me awhile to get back to sleep, so when my 5:10 alarm went off, I was too tired to get up and decided to skip the gym. This is surely what my pro-DST nemesis — a shadowy, lurking figure with no fixed address — had in mind. Having messed with my workout routine, when our climatic battle comes in the final scene, I will be weak as a kitten. Crafty bastard.
Oh, wait. That’s not real life. Hmmm, lack of sleep must be getting to me. Did I mention that, were we still under Eastern Standard Time, I could have been in bed an extra hour? Grumble.
My wife and I slept for crap Saturday night. I don’t know if it was worry about the alarm going off at the wrong time, or just the general uneazyness about this unnatural event. In any case, I remember waking up at least 3 times in the night.
My wife said today she still feels like she has jet-lag. This just isn’t natural! GRRRR.
Nothing went wrong for me! I just left my clocks on Eastern Standard Time, and that is where they shall remain.
Seems to me your problem isn’t DST, it’s your cell phone company. Verizon switched early Sunday morning, as it was supposed to. That’s the first thing they’ve done right in ages.
I have Verizon. At 10:30 EDT in Monticello, my cell phone was reading 9:30. Could be that some of my service area overlaps with Pulaski County and that caused some snags.
It’s just a minor hiccup, but I thought I’d grouse anyway.
“Could be that some of my service area overlaps with Pulaski County and that caused some snags.”
I always wondered what it would be like to live near a TZ line as far as wireless. Every TZ line has to have people that work or live in a county that gets their cell signal from the “other” side of the line. What a pain to have your cell bounce constantly between the right and wrong time for where you are standing! Good luck!
The real problem in that case is just not knowing which time your phone is displaying. But I’m just speculating on the Pulaski County overlap — for all I know Verizon was just slow in switching the tower that services my area.
Well, just to add more confusion, my cell phone did not automatically switch over to EDT. My mother’s did. She is on Verizon. I am not.
I did set all of my clocks ahead on Saturday, except for the one in my car and the one on my weather station, which gets the time from WWVB(?). I had to change the settings on that one so that it would acknowledge DST. I left it as the only clock inside the house that was on EST at bedtime.
My only clock problems were with the clock on the fireplace mantle and the clock radio that I use as the alarm clock. I hadn’t set the clock on the mantle in such a long time that I’d forgotten how to open it! The clock radio’s time setting function uses the same button for both hours and minutes. Again, it had been a long time since I’d changed the time. Felt kinda dumb. :) Other than those issues, my problems were waking to darkness on Sunday morning and really feeling that loss of one hour’s sleep.
WWVB is the radio signal from the NIST atomic clock in Boulder, CO. I have a wristwatch that gets the signal from there too.
The one perk of DST is that I can STOP resetting it. Since the watch didn’t understand that some places didn’t have DST, I would have to change from Eastern to Central on my watch twice a year.
it’s monday afternoon and my cellphone still had not switched over to EDT. i had to turn my phone off and then back on just now in order to get the time to update.
Several of my mom friends said they had kids throwing tantrums at bedtime last night because it was still sunny outside.
My real problems are in Pulaski County with the majority of the county working on “Commerce Time” (i.e. EDT) and some of the county operating on CDT. Now, you don’t know who is on what time and what time you should be working on. This has created a very confusing situation.
Jason:
I couldn’t remember if the call letters were WWVB or WWWB. Thanks for the information. My weather station must be a little different from your watch. It can be set for DST 0 (no DST) with the default time zone as EST, or to DST 1 to automatically observe DST. The weather station was actually easier to figure out than the low tech mantle clock! I felt pretty silly! :)
The place I used to work provided cell phones from Verizon. Back in the “old days” the cell phones would switch to EDT when we travelled to the far east side of town near the Ohio border. The switch was neither constant nor consistent, however.
What a p*ssy. Whining about doing something 99% of the rest of the country has been doing for years.
Grow up.
I think it is a communist plot or a far right wing conspiracy or maybe one of Mitch Daniels dirty tricks.
You kiss your mother with that mouth?
Virgin mobile only switched over when I turned my cell phone off and then back on.
“Whining about doing something 99% of the rest of the country has been doing for years. Grow up.”
Try thinking for youself for a change rather than just blindly do what 99% (BTW, it isn’t that high) of the rest of the country does. Also, is DST really what 99% of the county AGREES with?