Phone weirdness...

Phone weirdness...  We have a Panasonic cordless phone system at home, and yesterday we installed a new one that I'd purchased some time ago but had never set up.  With the new phone system we have eight handsets.  That might sound completely crazy unless you saw our house and barn.  I've got one handset on each floor of the barn, and then there are six scattered throughout the house.  Not really as phone-saturated as eight handsets sounds! :)

Anyway, we'd noticed something quite odd with our new phones: we'd set the date and time, then sometime later the time would change to seven hours later.  We'd fix it, and then sometime later once again, the time was seven hours later.  What the heck?

Well, seven hours later than Mountain Standard Time, at the moment, happens to be Greenwich Mean Time.  That got me to thinking that there might be a time zone setting in the phone, but no, there wasn't.  Well, what then? 

After a bit of research on the Internet, I found some references to others having the same problem – and there was a fix, too.  It turns out there's a setting buried a couple of levels down in the menu system, one that I had missed: a “time adjustment” option that lets the phone pick up the time from Caller ID or manually.  It was set to Caller ID by default.  I switched it to Manual, and if our experience is like others that will fix the problem.

Our phone isn't POTS and Ma Bell, it's Xfinity (Comcast) over our cable connection (along with our Internet).  While researching this I discovered that lots of people are having a similar issue, with multiple phone systems (Panasonic isn't the only phone vendor providing this feature) and multiple phone service providers (including some POTS lines!).  That makes me wonder why the phone system vendors seem to all default that setting to Caller ID...