Standard Time Switch Caught in Time Warp

iStockphoto

I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever get this time-change thing down.

When I went to pick my wife up at the airport on Sunday, it took me a second to figure out why the pay-and-go parking machine wouldn't let me pay and leave. I had spent almost an hour in the lot, but the machine was telling me that I was trying to leave 10 minutes earlier than I had actually arrived — it had changed back to standard time a week early. (So I ended up leaving without paying.)

The time warp was a result of an energy bill Congress passed in 2005 that moved daylight-saving time three weeks earlier in the spring and a week later in the fall, starting this year. Instead of falling on this past Sunday, the switch will be next Sunday.

Now, Congress built in a two-year waiting period to give people ample opportunity to make changes to computer software, clocks, etc. But that didn't stop problems from cropping up last spring.

David Prerau, who literally wrote the book on seasonal time changes, Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time, told me he expected that. "It's human nature. Look at Y2K. People had 10 years to make that change and still many waited until the last second," he said.

But he figured people would remember to make the change for the fall at the same time. Turns out that not everybody was so forward-thinking.

The Baltimore Sun reports that parking meters in the city fell back an hour, meaning some people got tickets. The New York Daily News notes that many BlackBerry phones, laptop computers and other gadgets switched back as well.

So did you lose an hour? Or like me, end up saving a few bucks because the time worked in your favor?

1:06 PM ET | 10-29-2007 | permalink