Ben Franklin couldn’t have seen this coming.

Among his many crazy ideas, this one was perhaps the zaniest:  twice a year, let’s have everyone in the country shift their clocks forward one hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall.  He reasoned that, in the summer, farmers were sleeping past sunrise and then using up valuable candle wax when they stayed up past sunset.  By shifting back an hour, a lot of candle wax could be saved.  He was right.  And luckily for us, our current government leaders are as wise as Old Ben, and certainly as dedicated to saving energy.  In 2005, President Bush – our greatest evangelist against the scourge of petroleum dependency – signed legislation moving Daylight Saving Time (DST) up 3 weeks, to March 11.  The intent is to save millions of dollars in fuel, and the results will be closely monitored by the Secretary of Energy over the next four years to determine if the change should be made permanent.

But somebody should have checked with Bill Gates first.  All those computers he sold before 2005 are in for a big hiccup, a little calendar glitch called the “DST bug.”  The IT guys are ripping their hair out.  Microsoft has set up a hotline for anyone with problems installing their “DST patch”.  It’s free for most people, but, as always, there are big chunks of the PC world that are no longer covered by Microsoft’s support programs.  Some older systems will need to pony up $4000 to deal with the issue.  And, in one of those great cosmic giggles, Forbes Magazine announced just this week that Mr. Gates would retain the title of “World’s Richest Man.”  For the 13^th year in a row.

So rise and shine in the dark this Sunday.  Gates will be sleeping soundly with many more Franklins under his mattress.