Lost an hour of sleep last night the way we do every March, and I spent this morning walking around the house fixing clocks like it's some kind of penance. The microwave. The oven. The weird little radio alarm clock that's been sitting on the guest room dresser since roughly 2014 and somehow still works. My phone fixed itself, obviously, and my laptop too, but half the "smart" stuff in this house apparently isn't smart enough to know that Daylight Saving Time started at 2am today.
The worst offender is the Nest thermostat, which for some reason showed the old time until I manually poked at it around 9. Not a huge deal in the grand scheme, except the heat had already kicked on an hour early because whatever schedule logic it's running clearly wasn't talking to whatever clock logic it's running. Two systems, not talking to each other, inside one $250 device that's supposed to be the smart one in the room. I don't know exactly what went wrong under the hood and I'm not going to pretend I debugged it, I just know I was sweating in a hoodie at 7am wondering why my house decided it was July.
And look, I get that this happens every single year and every single year I say the same thing, but: we were supposed to be done with this. The Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act back in March of last year, unanimously, to make Daylight Saving Time permanent and stop the twice-a-year clock nonsense for good. Then it just sat there. The House never took it up. So here we are again, an entire year later, doing the exact same dumb ritual of walking room to room resetting appliances that have no business needing to be reset by hand in the first place. If your coffee maker has a digital display it should be able to figure out what year it is. It's 2023.
Small tangent, but the analog wall clock in my kitchen doesn't care about any of this and somehow that's the one I trust most now. No firmware, no scheduling logic, no daemon quietly failing to sync. You just move the hands and you're done in ten seconds. There's a lesson in there somewhere about how much complexity we've bolted onto things that used to just work, but I'm not going to turn this into a whole manifesto about it.
Meanwhile the actual tech news this weekend had nothing to do with any of that. I kept half an eye on Twitter between clock-resetting trips and it was just wall-to-wall panic about Silicon Valley Bank, which got shut down by regulators on Friday after a run on deposits that apparently happened faster than almost anyone expected. I'm not a founder, I don't bank there, none of this directly touches me, but I still found myself opening my own banking app out of some weird reflexive anxiety, the way you check your smoke detector after hearing about a fire down the street even though your house is fine. Founders I follow were posting screenshots of frozen dashboards and asking how they were going to make payroll this week, and it was genuinely unsettling to watch play out in real time on a Saturday, in a way that made the thermostat thing feel appropriately small by comparison.
Anyway. Clocks are fixed, mostly. The oven is still blinking 12:00 because I honestly cannot remember the button combination and I've given up for now, so it'll just be wrong until I care enough to look it up again, probably in November when we do this whole thing backwards.
If your smart devices handled the time change fine this morning, good for you, genuinely, I'm a little jealous. Mine did not, and I don't think that's really a "me" problem so much as a "we built a bunch of half-smart gadgets and called it a day" problem. Rant over, going to go stare at the oven clock some more.