Back in spring I mentioned that the last Congress, many of whose members are still around, were a bunch of gibbering cretins for changing the established daylight savings time from what it's been for, oh, about half a century. The biggest problem wasn't just that it was a big change to get used to on short notice, or that it didn't get a lot of public debate before being signed into asinine law, or even that the reason it was done--ostensibly to save energy--was nonsensical and idiotic. It also isn't that kids are going trick-or-treating an hour later this year because it will be dark that much later. All of those things are problems of course, and they serve only to highlight the rank stupidity of this move.

But all those things are nothing compared to the real problem: a horde of devices that were created in the last few years, all hardwired to believe daylight savings happens at a certain time, most of which don't use firmware that can be updated. The cost of replacing those devices, updating the ones that can be updated, and living with the consequences of the natural fallout, is huge--more than offsetting any alleged energy savings which, frankly, I doubt were ever based on anything this side of the nuthouse.

This cavalcade of broken devices includes, among other things, the SmartSet alarm clock, which I got as a Christmas gift last year. Sadly by the time I had received it, this idiotic law had already rendered it obsolete. For three weeks it remained on standard time when the rest of the civilized US was on daylight savings. This made for a really weird adjustment and screwed me up a lot worse than usual, but at least the biggest danger was having the clock wake me up an hour early. Unfortunately, although I knew that today would normally have been clock-changing day if the aforementioned gibbering cretins weren't in charge of anything more dangerous than sharpening freaking crayons, I did not anticipate the flip side of the clock problem created by their shifting the return of standard time a week later.

Short version: This morning I had to pick up my father at about 8:30-8:45 where he was returning a rental truck that was used to move my furniture yesterday. I set the alarm for 7:45 because it usually takes me less than half an hour to get ready, and it would probably take 20-25 minutes travel to get to the rental place. But my clock, still believing it's in an alternate universe where Congress's stupidity (and in fairness, the President's in signing their whims into law) is limited, dutifully set itself to standard time on the day when by all rights it was supposed to. So when the clock woke me up at, it thought, 7:45, it was already 8:45.

The only upside to this galloping inanity is that when the clocks finally do get reset, it'll extend my wedding night an hour. In theory that's nice, but I'd settle for a legislature that wasn't comprised almost entirely of gormless incompetents.