The other day, The Mrs. came home from work grousing about how several meetings she had scheduled using Microsoft Outlook had disappeared from the master calendar because of a software update for this spring’s change in the start date for Daylight Saving Time.

Did you know there’s been a change in the start date for Daylight Saving Time? An energy bill signed into law in 2005 mandated it. We have been advancing clocks an hour on the first Sunday in April and turning ‘em back on the last Sunday in October. Starting this spring, we’ll advance them on the second Sunday in March and turn ‘em back on the first Sunday in November. Technically, this change is temporary pending a Department of Energy study on whether it’s worth it. Yeah, right—first of all, it’s estimated that the change will somehow save the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil per day, but in this kind of policymaking, estimates equal hard data, and 100,000 barrels of oil is a lot. But here’s another reason why the change is forever: It’s costing a bundle to make electronic devices compliant with the new law, and nobody, especially not the business-friendly American government, is going to require that expenditure be made again.

Think about it—your computer knows when to advance its clock to DST because it knows when the first Sunday in April is. If it connects to a networked or online time server automatically when booting up, as many computers do, it will get the message on the first Sunday in March and you may not notice any difference. But think about non-networked or offline computers, or devices equipped with computer chips, such as your digital camera or the watch on your wrist. Absent a software update, you’ll be fiddling with that stuff a little more often until the end of its useful life.

(For what it’s worth, this isn’t the first time the DST period has changed. The early-April-to-late-October dates have been in effect only since 1987; before that, DST ran from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. The United States went on year-round daylight time for a while during the energy crisis of the early 70s, and during both world wars. In 2001, California petitioned the federal government to be allowed to stay on DST year-round as an energy-saving measure, but after 9/11, the measure seemed less important, and the feds never acted on the request.)

Computer experts expect problems from the change to be fairly widespread but not very deep—in other words, mostly an annoyance. But it would be weirdly fitting if this change, which is getting not one-ten-thousandth the publicity of Y2K, marked the end of the world as we know it. As Steely Dan sang a few years back, “Little things might matter later/At the start of the end of history.”