Daylight Savings Time Bug...

The famous Y2K bug never materialized, but on the other hand, the Daylight Savings Time (DST?) bug is still with us.

A few days before this year's premature Spring Forward Sunday (SFS), Cingular actually called my cell phone an left and automated message telling me that I will need to manually adjust my time to accommodate the modified timing of time change. That surprised me because I know that phones get their local time data from the cell phone signal.

Still, against my best judgment, I complied. Albeit a bit late, because on Sunday morning I still managed to forget it was SFS.

Here's the thing. Within a few hours my phone reverted to the old, pre-SFS time. So I changed it again. It quickly changed back. And again. And again. This has been going on for a week and a half.

I have two theories about this bug. The first is that it's Cingular's fault. Whenever my phone polls Cingular, it gets an incorrect time reading, and that's what it shows.

The second is that the bug derives from an assumption that congress would never interfere with the timing of SFS. So the phone polls Cingular, gets a response that indicates some universal constant like Greenwich Mean Time, and calculates the local time based on location and its internal database on the timing of SFS. Which as we all know, was set forward by one month this year by special decree of congress to increase golf course revenues...