An inadvertent April Fool's Day joke

From the NIST website about WWV controlled clocks

Happy April Fool's Day. I hope the jokes played on you today are gentle and truly funny and don't cause you harm. At least not too much harm. My wife got my daughter and me this morning with a story about the Easter Egg Hunt being this morning instead of on Easter Sunday. Then my daughter immediately, upon being reminded of the day, ran over to my mother-in-law's place to tell her a "story". Our son would be getting up later but we knew he'd be getting up in time to go to church. But, he surprised us by getting up early. When he looked up at the clock, though, he realized he'd gotten up an hour earlier than he wanted to.

It turns out, the April Fool's Day joke played on him wasn't planned. It was caused by the 2007 change made to the rules for when we lose or gain an hour for Daylight Saving Time. The clock we bought him before 2007 is one of those that receive the radio signal from the WWV station in Fort Collins, Colorado. That information is used to keep the time on the clock corrected to the atomic clocks at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). You can read more about those types of clock here.

Unfortunately, this particular clock doesn't use all of the information that NIST includes in the WWV signal that indicates whether Daylight Saving Time is in effect or not. The clock has its own internal program to decide when to change the time. So, this morning was the old pre-2007 time for changing the clocks and the clock finally caught up to the official Daylight Saving Time and our son found out that 7 AM really was 7 AM. April Fool!

We've known about this since 2007, of course, and usually changed the clock ourselves - twice. Once on the official time and again (the opposite way) when the clock changed itself. But then my son just decided to "remember" that his clock was wrong for a few weeks each year. Well, I think we'll change that before the next time change. We'll either get him a new clock or see if we can keep this one from automatically changing the hour.

[Update - Boy, was this post written poorly. It's still not very well written but at least it's a bit better after this update.]