Day-light savings time screws with some Alltel customers. Did you get shafted?
By Will Park on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 2:55 PM PST In Alltel, Announcements, Services
Day-light savings time. It’s the quirky American tradition to squeeze out as much productivity out of the general working populace by rolling back (or forward) the clock to keep daylight in time with business hours. And, with more and more people relying on their mobile phone for telling time, bugs and glitches have the potential to royally screw up a workday.
That’s exactly what happened to some Alltel customers over the time-changing weekend. Apparently, there were some Alltel phones in Little Rock; Panama City and Tallahassee, Fla.; Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C.; and Richmond, Va. that turned the clock ahead by an hour rather than turning it back. The Alltel network bug caused cellphones on the No. 5 US carrier’s EVDO network to freak out and shaft customers of an hour of their life.
Some sort of error in the way the network sends updates to phones was evidently screwed up. Fortunately, the bug was detected and fixed in short order, so the damage was kept to a minimum.
So, did any of you Alltel subscribers get the shaft?
[Via: Yahoo]
Can you elaborate on these reports of the network “freaking out” or does “freaking out” simply mean “transmitting the incorrect time?”
I’m just curious, but also hoping that our new bloggers-as-citizen journalists can avoid the hype (read: lying in order to sell more) that has marginalized some fraction of legitimate journalism, at least here in the US.
Sorry, I guess it wasn’t clear when I stated that “there were some Alltel phones in Little Rock; Panama City and Tallahassee, Fla.; Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C.; and Richmond, Va. that turned the clock ahead by an hour rather than turning it back.
That’s pretty funny
Same thing happened to me with an article I wrote lol!
To be fair it’s an innocent mistake it’s simply a matter of reading things twice before talking once.
Haha, I like that – “reading things twice before talking once.”
That’s great
Hi Will,
I think you misread my post. I was commenting on your use of the words “freak out” to describe phones simply displaying the wrong time. That seems a bit overboard and, quite frankly, untrue.
” And, with more and more people relying on their mobile phone for telling time, bugs and glitches have the potential to royally screw up a workday.
That’s exactly what happened to some Alltel customers over the time-changing weekend”
*********
Ummm…screw up a workday – happened to Alltel customers this weekend/ See a contridaction here? I dont think 2am Sunday morning is a “workday” by most people standards. Maybe YOU’RE screwed up, but most peoples’ work days” were just fine by the time this was fixed bozo.