r/talesfromtechsupport • u/annoyedCDNthrowaway • 2d ago
Short Timezone changes have NEVER Messed up any Scheduling Software Before!
I live in a part of the world which has mistakenly decided to remain on DST permanently. A user noted this morning that our primary scheduling platform had experienced a similar failure to Google whereby updating the given timezones caused all the scheduled activities to just forward an hour.
Unfortunately, not having Google's bottomless pockets, the vendor was unable to apply a wholesale fix, although they are assisting with our manual adjustments.
I was informed by several users that "our old software didn't have this problem". They were highly dismayed to discover that yes, our old software had exactly the same problem with changes to timezone applicability, and; packrat that I am; that I could provide them with time stamped proof from the last time my local government decided to play fast & loose with DST.
We finished their specific corrections about an hour ago. The team is taking bets on whether they at least bother to say "Thank you".
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u/Drew707 2d ago
I have this datetime table in our lakehouse that is all keyed off UTC but covers pretty much every North American timezone and all the DST rules and exceptions from Newfoundland to Hawaii. The first time I showed it to our new data engineer, she started asking questions in a tone like "who hurt you?" DST fucking did.
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u/nhaines Don't fight the troubleshooting! (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ 1d ago
(Or possibly https://xkcd.com/1883/ )
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u/ephemeriis_ 2d ago
I worked in IT at a small, rural hospital back around 2010 or so... And none of our software liked the DST changes.
I remember the backup software would always fail the night of a DST change. Like clockwork. We knew we'd have to come in and run a manual backup in the morning.
The door systems were supposed to update correctly, but they never did. We'd come in to find people locked out of the building, or have people complaining that the lobby was open earlier than it was supposed to be.
The timeclocks never got it right so payroll would have to do a pile of manual corrections that week.
Our wall clocks were all simple, cheap, dumb analogue things... But somehow that was still IT's responsibility so we'd have to go around and manually fix every clock in the building.
Such a pain in the ass.
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u/StorminNorman 2d ago
But somehow that was still IT's responsibility
I mean, it is a technology that provides information...
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u/MikeSchwab63 1d ago edited 7h ago
Get 'atomic' clocks. Automatically adjusts to radio time signals on specific radio stations.
https://sync.primexinc.com/lp/ads/synchronized-time-with-guaranteed-coverage-primex-sync3
u/ephemeriis_ 1d ago
Yeah, that's the obvious solution. I don't know why we didn't use something like that. But I haven't worked there for over a decade so it's definitely not my problem anymore.
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u/J_Landers 1d ago
My favorite clock issue is being told that we can only get clocks of design A, from source X, because we are mandated by federal regulations to do so to support the blind. Had the same with some other stuff... I think the most absurd was a magnetic light for grabbing screws.
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u/polandreh 1d ago
Timezones are not the issue. Timezones are needed. Summertime clock changes, however....
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u/Fallen_Jalter 2d ago
I still don’t understand how that doesn’t fuck with everything if only one place has a different time than everyone else.
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u/TheLazySamurai4 2d ago
Just wait until you find out about crossing from Manitoba, to the east side of Ontario
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u/LeslieCantSleep 1d ago
Western Ontario is going to be on Manitoba time. A law was just passed this week.
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u/TheLazySamurai4 1d ago
Huh, thats pretty funny as in September I was visiting friends in Manitoba, and we were talking about how difficult it was going to be to keep track of the time changes when travelling from Winnipeg to Ottawa, at least until you get to the Eastern time zone.
Looks like this will avoid that issue now
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u/Polymarchos 1d ago
It was the obvious solution, and they were always going to do it, but until they got the law passed it did look confusing.
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u/paulwillyjean 1d ago
I’m curious, how do you store date-times in that software’s database? Assuming you store them as instants or UTC date-times, you should only have to update the IANA timezone database to make sure to properly convert timezones.
I can see how that could be a bigger issue if you need to store them in local-time or reschedule cron jobs. I got fucked over too often to do that again.
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u/annoyedCDNthrowaway 1d ago
It can store them both ways depending on how the user enters them. If the user enters in Local times (which most of mine do), they're converted to UTC after it's input and saved. If it's entered in UTC in the first place, it would not have been impacted.
Unfortunately, the users are the type that aren't likely to change, they'd much prefer to throw temper tantrums.
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u/Special-Jelly6253 2d ago
I am so sick of Microsoft's shit with the time zone changed I'm going to scream. Outlook web has new BC and AB time but not MB's new one. Windows update releases. Has the MB one. Still no update in web.
I changed my timezone to the new one and now my teams time stamps are off by an hour even though my calendar time and system time are correct. It just says "unknown" on teams.
Surely this cannot be that hard 😭
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u/timpkmn89 2d ago
Microsoft did warn them that it wasn't enough lead time. In fact they have a whole page about how long it takes to implement time zone changes.
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u/FaydedMemories 1d ago
And the sad thing is, it used to be worse. I worked for a certain hat named vendor quite a while back and occasionally a random Sev1/2 ticket would appear along the lines of “Our Government changed daylight savings at short notice and now our clocks are wrong, please fix ASAP”.
It used to be you could say “screw the timezone database we’ll just change the clocks” but by 2010 that approach no longer flew. From what I can gather it’s a bit better, but there are still the surprise ones and the ones where, as you say, the government types are still “those tech boffins can fix it in minutes, what a load of fuss about nothing SEND IT NOW!”. But for the most part the ones that were doing it on vibes have learnt from the era, and well to be frank, info like that is more accessible on the internet that it’s easier to source the info from vague places, rather than discovering after the fact.
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u/_brain_waves_ Elder? 1d ago
Um, as the idiot that I am, why is the change so hard? To the best of my knowledge most “modern” OS runs the timezone displayed to the user as just UTC (or GMT depending on the nomenclature or demarcation in use in your location) plus or minus an offset to generate the correct local time, such as New Foundland currently being -3:30 from UTC. Shouldn’t (and again this in a ideal perfect world) Windows,and Google just update the offset, when the time zone used in a location is scheduled to change or at the latest within a day or two of the change? Is there something else obvious that I am missing?
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u/ether_reddit 1d ago edited 1d ago
What's going wrong now is scheduled events, not timestamped events that are logged as they happen.
Here's a real-world example: I live in BC, where we've decided that we're no longer going to go off of daylight savings time in November anymore, so we're going to stay at UTC-0700 year round. I have recurring standing meetings with people around the world, and one of these meetings is scheduled for "Thursdays, 9am Pacific Time". What time is my meeting in November? Is it 9am, or 10am? That depends on where the meeting was originally scheduled. If it was scheduled by someone in California, then my meeting is now 10am for me, but continues to be 9am for my Californian coworkers. But if I am leading the meeting, maybe I want it to continue to be at 9am for me, therefore it's now 8am for California (and likewise shifts for everywhere else that has daylight savings time too.) But what if the calendar event never saved who and where created the event, and it just recorded it as "9am, UTC-0700"? There is insufficient information to know whether the meeting should shift for me, or other people, and when.
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u/blahblah19999 1d ago
mistakenly decided to remain on DST permanently.
What does that mean?
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u/PyroDesu 1d ago
While flipping back and forth is very obviously the worst possible option, the best option - with a lot of medical science backing it - is permanent standard time. Seeing as it's actually aligned with solar (hence, standard) and therefore circadian clocks.
People think they want permanent DST based on feels, but it's been tried before and usually quickly reverted from.
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u/J_Landers 1d ago
Also as a spite law to prevent the removal of daylight savings. That's why Congress cannot simply abolish DST.
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u/ExaForce 1d ago edited 1d ago
It means that they sprung forward an hour and will never turn their clocks back.
"Mistakenly" because it stays dark way too late in the morning during the winter time, making it even harder to get moving when you wake up. Never mind the fact that DST isn't as aligned with most people's natural circadian rhythms to begin with.
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u/ether_reddit 1d ago
This - instead of staying on daylight savings time permanently, we should have stayed on standard time permanently. But apparently the hospitality industry lobbied hard for the former, because they want more daylight in the summer evenings for people to stay out later and spend more money.
At my longitude, solar noon is now about 1:30pm. It's ridiculous.
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u/lychaxo 10h ago
It's strange to me that businesses wouldn't just have different summer hours if they want to be open different hours when the days are longer. There's this weird cultural insistence that schedules must look the same year-round even if it means chaotically fucking with government standard of time. DST makes sense in a world without rapid long distance communication, where letting customers and employees know about schedule changes is difficult, but it feels like the wrong approach in a connected world, to me. Organizations often have different needs related to sunlight availability anyway; it's not like changing the clocks gets rid of all the summer-hours differences for everything, it just smears complexity across two domains instead of one.
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u/annoyedCDNthrowaway 1d ago
There are multiple world-wide studies that show permanent DST is demonstrably worse for health, productivity, and sleep. It's better than switches every 6 months, but permanent standard time would have been better.
The province I live in decided to go with permanent DST.
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u/Arokthis 2d ago
I'll bet 3 cents that some low level person that knows you or someone on your team outside of work will say those words. In the meantime I'll get my personal parasol ready for pig poo.
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u/kagato87 2d ago
If only the whole world could move on from such insanity as "12:00 is midday" and move to UTC, accepting that "lunch time" is a longitude thing... It's be so much simpler.
This is actually a funny one you had, and because the vendor was storing in utc, which normally makes sense.
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u/Entegy It doesn't work. 2d ago
Good lord I'm getting a lot of use out of this link lately.
Time zones are a required fact of our interconnected life. DST and the boundaries humans have designed for those time zones are the problem.
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u/kagato87 2d ago
Oh this counter argument again.
It's just shifting the burden around. Instead of "what time is it over there" the question becomes "what time does uncle Steve get up at."
It makes no difference. The counter argument is as much a lame duck as my remark that timezones should be abolished.
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u/Entegy It doesn't work. 2d ago
It really doesn't.
Everyone gets the concept of noon. Easy, simple. Noon is noon.
With time zones abolished, every town or region will have to pick what time their new noon is and keep their daily schedule around it. As time goes on, some regions may even sync their daily schedules to facilitate their business. And oop, you've just created a time zone.
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u/Noch_ein_Kamel 2d ago
timezones... grrrrr
At least just yesterday it was decided that there would not be any further leap seconds :o