Spring ahead

Help Desk the Monday after Daylight Savings Time didn't go as badly as it could have considering that support was still rolling out patches as late as Friday afternoon. I had a few calls first thing in the morning about the time not rolling over wherein the user would set the clock forward to have it automatically fall back 15 minutes later. (The PCs were getting GMT time stamps from the server and adjusting because they hadn't received the patch.) This went on for a few hours before we finally received an e-mail with instructions on how to install the patch manually. This is the kind of thing we should have had before the day even started.

Even better, none of the "time stamp critical" systems, such as fax machines receiving market trades, seemed to have issues. Or, at least, I didn't field any of those calls and didn't see panicked warning appear on Instant Messenger.

All told, the call volume was not atypical for a Monday morning with about 16% of my calls devoted to Daylight Savings Time issues. A fairly painless rollout.

Wednesday may be a different matter when they roll out the long anticipated increase in password complexity. Passwords will now require several special characters. All vacation time has been canceled for the next week in anticipation of high call volumes.

Of course, this will not prevent me from skipping work on Friday to go to Millennicon.