What’s the savings of the new time?

After posting below on this Sunday’s clock change to Daylight Savings Time, I came across this article on the front page of the Chicago Tribune today. It’s as confusing as it sounded earlier.

While humans moved up the start of daylight-saving time this year, millions of machines–cell phones and video recorders, too–were programmed to mark the event in early April.

Techies throughout the country have been working feverishly in recent weeks to fix the glitch. It’s a job that will cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars.

The change is difficult enough on folks. Now it’s costing a ton of money, too. But it’s supposed to be a seamless change for you…

Analysts say a lot of fixes are being done automatically by companies with central control over devices.

Another reminder of how much privacy and control we don’t have.

For example, wireless networks will automatically update the clock on their customers’ cell phones. Comcast will do the same for digital video recorders, so no one who intends to record “King of Queens” at 6:30 p.m. Sunday will get a Billy Graham special at 7:30 instead.

Too bad. That could provide for some interesting situations.

Why are we spending all this money and going to all this trouble to move up DST so much earlier this year?

Congress decided in 2005 to move up daylight-saving time from the first Sunday of April to the second Sunday of March. The idea: More evening daylight would lead to energy savings.

So that’s it. I wonder how that was calculated. After all…

The daylight-saving glitch has forced companies to temporarily redirect their tech departments. That’s costly, both in time and money.

A medium to large corporate tech department has probably commissioned two to four people to fix the glitch, said Hammond, the Forrester analyst. Those workers have put in about two weeks on the task–about $50,000 in labor costs on average, he said.

At the nation’s publicly traded companies alone, the total cost to patch the glitch is $300 million to $350 million, Hammond estimates.

And those companies may get a chance to do it all over again. If substantial energy savings from the new daylight-saving time aren’t realized, Congress can switch back to the old date.

I’m left wondering how they’ll know. And if all the tech providers and users would be willing to go through this again…