Spring ahead, fall back ... sort of ...

Okay, I promised to tell you how the Government of Iraq (GOI) is trying to drive us insane through confusion. It all concerns the seasonal time change that so many of you will go through in about three weeks. You all probably remember that the U.S. used to change time this weekend during the year, but moved the spring and fall time changes, for some strange reason, by three weeks. This is no big deal if you live in the U.S. and you know the new time change date. In Iraq, however ... it's a nightmare of biblical proportions.

When I went to college in South Bend, IN we were used to strange issues related to the seasonal time change. Back in those days, Indiana did not participate in Daylight Savings Time with the rest of the country. So, for six months out of the year, we were in a different time zone than Michigan. This would not be a big deal, unless you factor in that the state of Michigan BORDERS South Bend, IN. Invariably, this lead to confusion when you had anything to do in Michigan. It also led to confusion when you realized that you weren't sure what time it was at home anymore. I can't tell you how many times I called my house at the "wrong" time (according to my parents ... apparently phone calls at 10 PM are a no-no in my house). We would blame our mistakes on the time zone thing. They don't have this excuse anymore since Indiana has moved into the 20th century and subscribed to Daylight Savings Time.

Back to Iraq - the GOI (with some prodding from the U.S.) decided to implement DST since the U.S. presence here. They, however, keep the change weekends the same as the original weekends in the U.S. Since the U.S. changed weekends, this has led to mass confusion in the GOI. This week, we didn't know when the change date would be until the DAY prior. This creates some issues when trying to schedule things for the following week. If that wasn't bad enough, at 7:45 PM on the night that we were scheduled to change over, we received an E-mail telling us that the GOI decided to change the date by 24 hours. Only problem with that is: probably half of the folks who needed to know about it were at their computers at 7:45 PM. Needless to say, most folks went through today not knowing what time it is. I'm sitting here in the "Golden Hour" of time where I have just reset my clock and am back in the month of September ... after spending approximately 15 seconds in October. It's enough to give you headache from having to think about it. So I'm going to bed ... hopefully I will wake up at the right time and hopefully this is the last time I have to deal with idiocy from the GOI while I'm here ... but I'm not holding my breath on that one. Until tomorrow.

-Grease out.