Twice a year, in the United States anyway, we change our clocks. Like many people I think this is a useless activity that only serves to confuse people and mess with their sleep patterns. As if setting our clocks ahead an hour each spring and back an hour each autumn for “daylight savings” wasn’t bad enough, recently we decided to change the dates when those two events occurred.
This morning my Verizon HTC Incredible decided that it was time to set the clock back an hour even though the official time change doesn’t occur until next Sunday morning. I have the phone set to automatically get the time from the cell tower, which means the issue is at Verizon’s end of the wire. Or air wave in this case.
I poked around on Google for any reports of this issue and, finding nothing, I went to the Verizon support page to see what I could find. Their page was less than helpful. As a last resort I called *611 and spoke to a representative. Well, in truth I called twice. The first time I followed, or tried to follow, the menu system to allow them to identify my issue. When that failed I hung up, called back and pressed zero over and over until I was transferred to a human.
After explaining my issue he asked me to run part of the phone configuration process. By doing this, he said, it would re-sync the phone with the cellular network. He said he’d call me back in a few minutes to see how things had gone.
After hanging up I called *228 on my phone, and selected option 2. The phone took about a minute to complete the task (complete with obnoxious background music). When that completed the time was still wrong. So I rebooted my phone, which corrected the time.
Caveats: I rooted my phone in June, and I am currently running Cyanogenmod 7.1 instead of the stock HTC Android. Whether the rooting or flashing caused the time issue I do not know. Also, I hadn’t thought to reboot my phone before calling Verizon, so I don’t know if that would have reset the time.
While I had the representative on the line I asked about my hardware update eligibility date. which is currently February 9, 2012. He couldn’t do anything about it, but he said that going to the store I might be able to get that moved ahead by 30 - 60 days. Which would allow me to get an iPhone 4S in December. Maybe I’ll practice my take-pity-on-me look and swing by there this afternoon and hope for a 102 day exception.