Are We Saving Yet?

In case you hadn't heard, Daylight Savings Time starts on Sunday, March 11, a good three weeks earlier than it has since 1986. This, we are told by Congress, will unleash hitherto undreamt-of savings for the American people as we frolic in the extra hour of daylight at the end of each day for three glorious additional weeks.

It must have been a very slow day at Congress when they dreamed this up. Now that they can't build useless bridges anymore, they're forced to torment us with time changes to idle away the hours spent stuck in session on Capitol Hill. Anyone who thought about this would recognize two immediate problems:

1. We'll have to turn the lights on when we're getting ready for work in the morning, because it will be dark, even though it was light this week.

2. Computers can't handle this.

That second one is the bugaboo for businesses, such as ours. We won't get a dime in energy savings, because the lights and computers are on in the office anyway, as they are in every office where I've ever worked. What we do get is an IT bill to keep our Calendar working, which, at the moment, it isn't, at least as far as March 12 is concerned.

You see, every computer-driven device sold in North America has an internal clock. This clock has Daylight Savings Time programmed into it, so that it automatically changes on the first Sunday in April. This year, that's happening on the second Sunday in March, and since the computer's clock doesn't know that, someone has to write a bit of code to tell it what time it is.

The server that runs 1-800-Bakery.com also needs the script to make our Calendar work and enforce the 2PM Eastern Time order cutoff. Unfortunately for us, the new daylight savings time script and the Calendar aren't getting along too well, so the Calendar thinks that you can have cakes delivered on March 12. You can't, because the cakes would melt in the back of the delivery truck over the weekend. Our server doesn't know that, either, and it wouldn't care anyway, since it's a server and cares little for the fate of cake.

As a result, I've had to deactivate March 12 as a delivery date, which has the following unpleasant consequences: You can't place an order for March 13 and orders for March 14 have to be shipped Overnight, thanks to the rules of the Calendar. In reality, none of this is true. We can ship on the 13th and the 14th is available at the Second-Day Air rate, but if you want to do that, you'll need to either--

A. Wait until after 2PM Eastern Friday to place your order,
B. Read these instructions on how to place your order for any of the offending days, or
C. Join us in praying that our dev team can fix the problem at their not-insignificant hourly rate, which we wouldn't have to pay if Congress hadn't mucked around with daylight savings time in the first place

You can always call our Customer Service line at 1-800-287-9870 if you're still confused. Call your congressional representatives, too, and thank them for all the extra work they're making for us. At least the sun will be out when the dust settles on Monday.