Not having enough to worry about, I’ve been obsessing lately about Early Daylight Saving (no “s”) Time, which starts this weekend, and ends the first weekend in November. It’s not the effect it has on me that’s worrying me this time, although now that I think about it next week is going to be miserable, isn’t it?

This change, three weeks earlier and one week later than usual, is likely to throw electronic gadgets for a loop. I’m pretty sure the computer will be okay, because I believe a patch was downloaded several months ago to take care of the shift. My VCR, though, is not going to know what’s going on. I hardly use it any more, but it thinks it’s supposed to set its clock an hour ahead the first weekend in April. It does it every year on the right date, and I’m sure it will do it this year. By that time it will have been recording the wrong programs for three weeks. It won’t know what time the Ten O’clock News is on.

The thing to do, I suppose, is turn off the automatic Daylight Saving Time feature of the VCR and set it myself, by hand, the way we did in the old days when VCRs ran on steam and had analog clocks. As little as I use it lately, it might not even be worth the trouble, but you never know. It’s a nice backup system in case my TiVo hard drive fills up. And as much TV as I watch, that’s always a possibility.

It’s TiVo, in fact, that worries me, because I have a Series 1 unit that isn’t as fully supported as some of the newer models. I’ve been haunting TiVo users’ message boards trying to get an answer. I started noticing a week ago that the program schedule, beginning next Sunday, is an hour off. I know TiVo knows when the programs will come on, but I don’t know that it will know what time it is. It thinks The Amazing Race comes on at 7:00 pm, which I guess it does if you think midnight occurs at 11:00 pm.

It’s strangely 1984-ish, but then this whole technology is a little other worldly. I’m waiting for Big Brother (if not Big Brother) to tell me it has solved this problem. All I’ve been assured so far is that my Season Pass programs will record at the time they air. Anything I’ve set to record manually only knows what time I’ve set it for, and if it’s an hour off I’ll be recording something else. It’s no way to run an airline (or a railroad, which is the industry that invented time zones in the first place).

As for the clocks in my car, the microwave, the coffee maker and the radio by my bedside, I’ll be changing those myself, as I always have. I haven’t worn a wristwatch since mine stopped running on Halloween day last year, so it will show the correct time twice a day, as it has for the last four and a half months.