Today, March 15, I received a text message from Cingular letting me know that we are going to change to Daylight Saving Time on March 11. Oh yes, my Blackjack will need a software update last Sunday. When I went to check this out on the Cingular Support Page, I found that the page had been updated to say that, yes indeed, I will need to update my Blackjack on or before the 11th.

I draw several lessons from this. First, it’s to Cingular’s credit that they did eventually figure it out and deliver correct information to their customers–I’m going to assume that other Blackjack owners got a similar message in their in-box today. Next, in a company the size of Cingular/AT&T you’d think they could find someone who has mastered verb tenses. They need some work on the whole past/present/future thing. Finally, while I give them credit for eventually sending out correct information, why wasn’t it available, oh, last Saturday (March 10th)? It’s not like this whole Daylight Saving Time were some last-minute surprise tossed at the phone company. There were announcements about this. It was in all the larger papers.

Of course, I shouldn’t complain too loudly, since Cingular is far from the only small business to have trouble with the shift to Daylight Saving Time. Yesterday when I flew back from San Francisco our Delta Air Lines 767 gave us the local time at our destination. Yep, their clock hadn’t gotten its new marching orders. It’s hard to explain just how much confidence that gave me as we soared into the sky. It was enough to make me forget all about my cell phone…

I have a Samsung Blackjack phone from Cingular. On the whole, it’s a fine cell phone, though I’ll admit that I often miss the Treo I was using in my last job. Anyway, I went out to the Cingular support site and was told that I didn’t need to do anything to the Blackjack–it was ready for the shift to Daylight Saving Time. With my other systems patched, I felt pretty good. Silly me.

When I got up yesterday morning I had to quckly head out to the airport, so I didn’t look at the phone for a couple of hours. When I did, I noticed that the Blackjack was still on standard time. I turned it off on the plane, and when I turned it back on at the mid-point of the trip I expected the time to have reset. Nope. Turning the phone off and traveling to California didn’t help, either. Rats.

I finally did some searches and found that Microsoft had released a Special Daylight Saving Patch for the Blackjack. I downloaded the patch, applied it to the phone, and the world was once again in temporal balance.

So what’s the lesson here? I suppose it’s that you shouldn’t trust a single participant in a multi-vendor system to tell you all you need to know. In my case, there are three vendors who have portions of my phone; Cingular, Samsung, and Microsoft are each participants. My mistake was assuming that Cingular would have a handle on the operating system issues. It would be nice if the company that directly took your money for a product could be counted on to properly support it, but that may be asking too much in today’s world. Congratulations, pilgrim–you’re on your own. The times, they are a-changing, and it’s up to you to make sure all your systems keep up.

Vista will have enough problems winning the PR wars without large numbers of people with illicit, malware-infested downloads trying to make the system work. Stick with the legitimate copies–if you can’t afford to buy Vista, figure out how to run one of the modern Linux distros or buy one of the cheap Macs. I know it might cost a few bucks, but if you’ve got a few dollars to spend on hardware you migh be ready to make the Mac plunge–see, Vista is spurring competitiont already!