Daylight saving glitch leaves hangover for some

When daylight saving time came two weeks early this year, there was concern that there might be a host of problems. There were some, but like the Y2K bug, there was not widespread mayhem and chaos as the movie-of-the-week industry might have hoped.

But Congress didn't just spring forward a little early this year. It's also is making us wait a week longer to fall back. Instead of changing this past weekend, we don't go back until next weekend. I thought most of the gadgets would know, but it appears not all of them got the message.

At least from a quick survey of folks in the newsroom, minor glitches still seemed to abound. One of our editors got in her family's Mercedes C320 on Sunday and was surprised to find herself ahead of schedule. "We were startled," she said. "We thought we were suddenly an hour early."

Another co-worker had his Treo shift back to daylight saving time. As a result, he set all his clocks back an hour and strolled into work a bit late Monday, though looking quite well rested. He realized something was amiss when he noticed his neighbors leaving for work an hour earlier than normal. "The extra hour of sleep was awesome," he said. (For the record, Palm did post an update to its Web site some time ago to fix the issue.)

Yet another colleague was woken an hour early by his BlackBerry Curve, which he uses as an alarm clock. Other BlackBerry-toters also reported issues, though RIM has also been posting warnings on its Web site.

Meanwhile in Baltimore, some of the city's parking meters fell back too soon, leading to unwarranted tickets, though the city won't make people pay for the meters' malfunction.

Got any good stories of gadgets that missed the mark? E-mail me or post them below.