Sunday, October 30, 2005

How do you know daylight savings time is beginning when you don’t know that daylight savings time is beginning?

Italy vacation countdown: T minus 5 days.

Note: Due to the size of some of the photos posted, the sidebar that is usually located on the right side is at the bottom of the page. In case you are looking for it...

That’s a good question. Not every country around the world observes this time changing/daylight savings time (DST) phenomenon. For example, Korea does not. Neither does Taiwan or Hong Kong. And since we have not really lived in the US since 2001, well…we just weren’t clued in that the last Sunday of October was fast approaching AND that the clocks were changing, or as we say in the US, “falling back”.

No, our newspaper did not hint at it, but then again, our paper is a regional European paper. So nothing from that source. No one at work made mention of it towards the end of last week, but then again, why would they? If once assumes everyone in the world observes DST time changes, then one assumes everybody knows. Since we are still in the no-man’s land of no TV (we are going to try to get this issue resolved after Italy), we could not see any clocks on CNN or hear any newscasters refer to the time. Of course, phone clocks have to be re-set, so that was of no help.

Curiosity getting you? Well, the short answer is that we turned on our computers on Sunday morning, and we noticed that our PC clocks were different. Those Dell and Microsoft people are SO smart! Upon further inspection (and a reference to the Qclock software on my PC), we confirmed that the times in NY, Dallas, London, Paris, and Sydney were also different. Ah, it must be that DST thing.

I bet you’d never pondered this question before….

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