2025-03-09 02:00:00 EST DOES NOT EXIST


This is probably painfully obvious to anyone who has worked with datetimes in their applications before, but my first in-the-wild encounter of this happened in 2025 when validating the database insertion times for some data. I was delighted when I realized it wasn't a bug in our code but a instance of the familiar Daylight Savings Time skip ahead.
My parents taught me this mnemonic: In the Fall you "fall back" an hour. In the Spring, you "spring forward" an hour.
The extra information added by Javascript's toString() function, including a switch from GMT-0500 to GMT-0400 as well as from (Eastern Standard Time) to (Eastern Daylight Time) helps demystify this skip in absence of the social awareness of the time transition.