2 Texans Down Under

This was supposed to be yesterday’s blog, but something more pressing came up. It would have been perfect for April Fool’s Day, a Y2K sort of story in 2008 … except that it’s all true.

Here is a paragraph from a report by Ryan Emery in “The Australian” for March 31: “Yesterday Western Australia returned to standard time, leaving NSW, the ACT, Victoria and South Australia keeping track with Tasmania … and Queensland and Northern Territory somewhere in the middle.”

That was, more or less, the good news. Before I get to the bad news, I need to offer my US readers a few translations and bits of fact. NSW means New South Wales and it is a state, as are Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia. “The ACT” is the Australian Capitol Territory, where Canberra is located. “Northern Territory” is a federal territory that occupies most of the north end of Australia.

Now, with the geography lesson done (don’t feel bad, I needed it, too), let’s turn to time. Time in Australia.

Australia has Western, Central, and Eastern time zones. Parts of the Northern Territory are in each of the three.

In Tasmania, until this year, daylight savings time ended on the last Sunday in March, which put that island state south of Victoria out of sync with its neighbors.

So, this year, officials in New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania agreed to a new plan — they’d all turn their clocks back one hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, April 6. The only problem was that a lot of people and a lot of computer programs didn’t get the message about delaying the shift for one week.

They result was, in some parts of this country, a mini-Y2K.

Personal computers, some hand-held Blackberries, many cell phones, and even some automated telephone company correct-time services gave people Read the rest of this entry »