Daylight Savings Woes

CHAMPAIGN - This year, Americans are springing forward a little early, three weeks early to be exact. Some say that could cause headaches for those who rely on computers and other gadgets to get them through the day.

We live in a high tech world governed by laptops, cell phones, PDA's, you name it, and it's those high tech gadgets that get many of us through the day that could fall behind when the clocks spring forward. Jon Zelle owns Zel-tech, a computer service company, here in Champaign. He says many computers and hand-held devices will not readily recognize the new daylight savings time date. "Today's technology, we're so dependent on our calendaring, scheduling systems on our hand-helds and desktops. so if you're really dependent and live off of that calendar and it's an hour off, you could have some hiccups come Monday or Tuesday," said Zelle.

Zelle says this is far from Y2K and definitely nothing to panic about. He adds if you do live and die by your computer calendar, all is not lost. Fixes are readily available and just a click away in most cases. Microsoft, for example, has numerous downloads or "patches" to fix the time conundrum on their homepage for everything from hand-helds to Windows XP. Zelle says most companies have long since prepared for for the "new" daylight savings time.

He says it's the smaller companies that need to make sure they are up to date. "If I was scheduling all of my resources and I was in Plumbing or air conditioning and all my folks are out responding to service calls at a certain date and time, then Monday could be a lot of phone calls to clients saying oh, we're running an hour behind."