The United States Congress decided to alter the dates of the semi-annual time change in an attempt to save oil. Personally, judging by the excited voices and long hours involved, I think more energy was used making the adjustment than might be saved.

I first heard about the change in December. Hoping it would go away, I avoided any mention of it. In January, shortly before I left for Lotusphere, the head of the DST project pulled me into his office to talk about the problem. Claiming ignorance, I promised to ask someone more knowlegeable.

While at Lotusphere I declined a 2-hour phone conference on the subject. Instead, I got the steps to follow from a Lotus developer -- which I emailed to my boss and the project manager. At my next dial-in, I got a message saying the decision had been made to implement the changes in a different order.

On returning to work I checked with my colleague at the corporate office and got the updated schedule. We talked over the issues and decided how to proceed.

A few days later, there was another conference call. In the midst of it, someone screamed that we couldn't make the changes, the chance of data loss was too great. Someone else yelled back, we didn't have a choice. The only decision made was to have another meeting the next week. I returned to the growing list of items needing update.

Things kept popping up. The server and workstation operating systems needed patching. An agent had to be run against individual mailfiles. Another agent needed to be run against the rooms and resources database. Java had to be patched. Then there were changes to be made to the Forms databases for webmail users. And a change to the mNotes database. Directions had to be written for users on how to update their handheld devices. And there were changes to be made to Department Calendar. Thankfully, I didn't need to worry about the BlackBerrys; that was my colleague's responsibility.

The Notes agents, supplied by IBM, seemed to go through hourly upgrades from 1, to 2, to 3, to 4, and on and on. The last update I saw for the agents was two days before the time change.

IBM supplied more detail than did Microsoft. The directions from CommonTime on updating mNotes were brief and to the point. The conference call with Logic Springs Technology on Department Calendar was detailed. I panicked when I got a notice from McAfee about patching ePolicy Orchestrator until I realized it said no change was needed. I developed a nervous tic from fielding vendor directions on one side and management decisions on the other.