Weekly Update 03/07/26 – 03/13/26 (Broken Foot Diagnosis, Workplace Scam Attempt, Daylight Saving Time History)

Weekly Update 03/07/26 – 03/13/26 (Broken Foot Diagnosis, Workplace Scam Attempt, Daylight Saving Time History)

Weekly update covering a foot fracture diagnosis, a workplace impersonation scam attempt, and the history behind daylight saving time.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is my toe is not broken. The bad news is that my foot is.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking out of my bedroom when I managed to catch my pinky toe on the metal leg of my bed. It hurt terribly, and I was concerned that I might have broken my toe. The pain subsided as the day went on, but it still hurt to walk on uneven ground or put on my shoes. Since there is not much that can be done for a broken toe, I just let it heal.

A couple of days later, I was stepping into the shower when I stubbed the same toe on the edge of the tub. Again, the pain was severe and then subsided as the day went on.
A few days after that, I accidentally kicked a shoe that was on the floor and the pain came back again.
It was obvious that something was wrong, so I got a special shoe to protect my foot. It is designed to be worn after foot surgery.

This week I had a doctor's appointment, and while I was there I asked if I needed to do anything else for the toe. She examined it, noted the swelling and that the two toes next to it were bruised, and suggested I get an X-ray.

The X-ray showed that I had not broken my toe. Instead, I had a fifth proximal phalanx fracture. In other words, I had broken the bone in my foot where the toe connects to the foot. Now I will keep wearing the protective shoe and taping my pinky toe to the one next to it. This will likely last about six weeks. Until then, I will not be able to go for my morning walks.

I did get a pool noodle, cut it into pieces, and placed them on the legs of my bed to help prevent this from happening again in the future.

While I was at the doctor's office, I also found out that the provider I have been seeing for just over six months as my primary care physician is leaving PeaceHealth. She is a PA-C (Physician Assistant, Certified), and unfortunately I will no longer be able to see her.

It took months of waiting to get that appointment after my hospitalization back in June, and I was worried that I would have the same long wait to get a new primary care provider. In the past I had good experiences with the Vancouver Clinic, although I had to stop working with them when I lost my job and my insurance a couple of years ago. Now that I have a new job and new insurance, I checked with them again. I now have an appointment in April to meet my new PCP, an MD this time.

I was at work yesterday morning when a text message came in on my phone. The person texting me claimed to be someone whose name I will not use here. She is a vice president of the company I work for and the direct supervisor of the person I report to.

The message asked me to run out to the Apple Store, buy some equipment, and send it to her, with the promise that I would be reimbursed later.

I was immediately suspicious. I had only met this person once during the interview process, so the request seemed unusual. I opened Slack and asked her directly if she was the one texting me. She thanked me for checking and confirmed that it was not her.

Frankly, I was shocked that a scammer had managed to locate my phone number, determine what company I worked for, identify who I report to, and even know who that person reports to. That suggests they did quite a bit of research before attempting the scam. In the end, I simply blocked the number.

Other than that, things at work are going well. I am developing tools to integrate our software with the FACTS system, setting up the API envelopes needed to transfer customer, ship-to, terms code, and salesperson information from FACTS to the eBiz system.
I have also taken advantage of the FACTS metadata system so that updates can happen automatically. If information in FACTS changes, the system updates eBiz automatically. As a result, I only need to maintain one program instead of trying to locate every point in the system where that data might be updated.

This week daylight saving time also started, and we all set our clocks ahead by one hour, at least the clocks that did not update automatically. That made me think about the origins of daylight saving time.
For years I believed daylight saving time was introduced during World War II to help workers get home before dark so that blackout rules could be maintained to prevent bombing of cities.

I was curious whether that was correct, and since we now have access to very knowledgeable computers, I checked with Astra (ChatGPT). It turns out that my assumption was not correct.

According to Astra:
Daylight Saving Time (DST) was first proposed as a practical idea in the late nineteenth century. In 1895 New Zealand scientist George Vernon Hudson suggested moving clocks forward during the summer to create more usable daylight in the evening. The concept was later promoted in Britain by William Willett in the early 1900s, who argued that people were wasting valuable daylight during summer mornings.

The idea was first adopted nationally during World War I when Germany introduced daylight saving time in 1916 to conserve coal and reduce energy used for lighting. Other countries, including the United States in 1918, soon followed. During World War II the United States again adopted extended daylight saving, called “War Time,” keeping the country on daylight saving year round in order to conserve electricity and fuel needed for the war effort.
The underlying theory behind daylight saving time has always been that shifting an hour of daylight into the evening would reduce the need for artificial lighting and therefore save energy, though modern research suggests the actual energy savings are relatively small.
The United States nearly eliminated the seasonal clock change in the 1970s during the energy crisis that followed the 1973 oil embargo. Congress passed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act, which put the country on year round daylight saving beginning in January 1974. Lawmakers believed that keeping more daylight in the evening would reduce electricity demand during a time of fuel shortages.

However, the policy quickly ran into problems because winter sunrises became very late in the morning, in some places after 8:30 AM. Children were waiting for school buses and people were commuting to work in complete darkness. Several highly publicized accidents led to public backlash. Support for permanent daylight saving collapsed within a few months, and Congress reversed the experiment later that year, returning the country to the familiar pattern of standard time in winter and daylight saving time in summer.

Benjamin Franklin is often credited with inventing daylight saving time, but this is actually a misunderstanding. In 1784 Franklin wrote a satirical essay titled An Economical Project while living in Paris. In it he joked that Parisians could save money on candles if they woke earlier and used natural daylight. His tongue-in-cheek suggestions included taxing window shutters and even firing cannons at sunrise to wake people up. Franklin never suggested moving clocks forward or backward, and the essay was meant as humor rather than a serious policy proposal. Over time, however, the essay became loosely associated with the later development of daylight saving time, which is why Franklin is still often mentioned when the subject comes up today.
 

— Odell Sneeden Hathaway III

Previous

Weekly Update 02/28/26 – 03/07/26