Share your anecdotes, stories and rants please.
I’ve always thought that the situation would be a veritable breeding ground for confusion.
Maybe even a plot line for a made for TV movie. Take note all you aspiring scriptwriters.
From “The West Wing”, episode title: “20 Hours in America”. After the President makes a campaign speech in Indiana, several staffers find out why they missed their flight to the next campaign stop.
Yep, the time zone changes not very far from where I live/work.
Absolutely there can be confusion.
Don’t have any amusing anecdotes at the moment.
When setting up a meeting across the line there’s usually much discussion of “my time” or “your time”. One does adapt to the situation. There’s a certain amount of people showing up either an hour early or an hour late for things.
Ha ha ha - oh, my
Yes, that also happens.
I live in Indiana. We have five - FIVE! - different time zone areas.
No, I do not have to re-set my watch when I cross the line - although if I’m going to be there a while and need to track time closely I might. If I still wore a watch. My cellphone re-sets itself after 10-15 minutes, I don’t have to do anything.
I had two weeks when my daily commute crossed the line (temporary re-assignment to another store). I managed just fine, but then, I live here and I’m used to dealing with it. As in the clip, it’s the people who don’t live near such a line that are most likely to have a problem like that.
Local government offices run on local time. For something relevant state wide it’s not unusual to see a modifier like “Indianapolis time” to clarify when something is happening (you adjust if your time is different than the capital’s).
This was a thing for railroaders that regularly travelled across time zones.
Here’s an early pocket watch with an ingenious solution:
(Most examples had two hour hands permanently set ONE hour apart.)
Old story:
A passenger on a train wanted to know when the train would reach the station. The conductor stated “4:00”, only to have a long discussion over which time zone that was. Finally, in a flash of inspiration the conductor smiled and said "The train will pull into the station in exactly two hours. The passenger gave a blank stare and asked “Is that two hours Mountain Standard time or two hours Pacific Standard time.”
We had an Executive Briefing Facility (a kind of fancy conference center with lots of Audio-Visual equipment that was not common at the time) right on the Georgia side of the Alabama border.
Many of the customers coming to the center would fly into Birmingham airport (Central Time) and then take a limo to the center. Others would fly into Atlanta.
For a few weeks, a LOT of visitors arrived late because their flight arrival time in CST/CDT was set too late to make the meeting scheduled in EST/EDT. Even after we tightened up communication to stress the time zones it still happened about once every couple of weeks.
So we had to decide whether to keep Important Customer A waiting 45 minutes for Even More Important Customer B to arrive, or to start the session and risk pissing off Customer B.
One lesson learned: Never ever try to lay the blame for a fiasco on an executive’s Personal Assistant. Executive’s PAs are an extension of the executive’s own identity and they can be more protective of them than a Tiger of her cubs. And vice versa. The PA derives all their power and status from their boss, so the boss can do no wrong, at least as far as third parties are concerned.
My MIL lives in Indiana near Louisville and frequently complains that they should be on Central time. Of course if they were, sunset would be around 4:30P today.
Broomie would be the expert. I attest that when I worked in IN, pretty much every time I called someone either in IN, IL, or MI, I would ask, “What time is it where you are?”
IIRC, it was further complicated by the fact that not all of the time zones changed their clocks for daylight savings. So you would be on the same time as one location part of the year, but not the other. But, as I recall, that has since changed.
I have watched every episode and absolutely do not remember that. Now I’ve got to re-binge the whole series. So much for productivity this weekend. 
TIL that’s a thing. Cool!
When I Googled the question before starting this I came across a report where a smaller town was across the state line and TZ line from a major city and had decided to use the big city TZ to avoid confusion.
Basketball player and space cadet Marvin Barnes had a shaky relationship with time zones, as recounted by Bob Costas, who was the team’s announcer when Barnes played in St. Louis.
"We were playing in Louisville against the Kentucky Colonels. Now, Louisville is only about a five-hour drive from St. Louis, but it’s on Eastern time. So we play the game and lose, and the next morning we gather at the airport.
"And the traveling secretary hands out the itinerary and it says: ‘TWA Flight No. 305. Depart Louisville 8 a.m. Arrive St. Louis 7:55 a.m.’
“Well, Marvin looks at the paper and beckons me and says, ‘Bro, I don’t know about you, but I’m not getting on any time machine.’ So I say to him, ‘Marvin let’s test your premise. Does this mean if we get on this plane and fly west indefinitely we’ll eventually meet Abraham Lincoln’?”
For while there was a band called The Marvin Barnes Time Machine.
Can you explain more specifically how this works? The Wikipedia article is very confusing and seems obsessed with detailing the history, not the current setup. When you say “5 time zones” I don’t doubt you, of course, but it sounds like there are 5 different hours of the day involved – like being simultaneously 9am in Fort Wayne and 4:00 in the morning in Gary.
When I was a kid I used to take a short plane hop from Nashville to Indianapolis regularly, and due to DST issues in effect at the time, the plane landed before it took off at certain times of year. Mind-blowing to an eight-year-old!
My understanding is that, until 2006, most of the Indiana counties in the Eastern Time Zone didn’t observe DST, while the portions in the Central Time Zone (and a few of the Eastern Time Zone counties) did. It had the net effect of having most of the state be on the same time during the DST period.
But, starting in 2006, all of the state observed DST.
I’m not sure what the five are, but I can think of four theoretically: Central vs Eastern and Daylight Saving vs Non-daylight Saving observed. As far as I know, currently there are only two: Central and Eastern, both observing DST, but this wasn’t the case until around 2006, as @kenobi_65 stated. Before, I remember most of Indiana did not follow DST, the part near Chicago was Central (ETA: as well as a part in the southwest near Evansville) and followed DST, and the part near Louisville was Eastern and followed DST, but that’s only three time zones (and there’s never a difference of more than an hour between them.)
The only time I remember this causing confusion – though in a good way – was when we were rushing for the Notre Dame vs Northwestern game at Notre in 1995, and thought Indiana was on daylight eastern time, when they were on standard eastern time (so same time as Chicago.) Instead of getting there just in the nick of time, we ended up with plenty of time to spare and no need to rush around.
Going to Tuba City, AZ in the summer is very confusing.
Arizona doesn’t observe DST, but the Navajo Nation does. The Hopi nation, which is completely surrounded by the Navajo Nation doesn’t observe DST, like the rest of Arizona. The two Nations share a border in Tuba City, which means that the time changes across the street. There are signs up at all the hotels warning about the possible time confusion, but it doesn’t help.
I don’t know if you could call it close because it’s about four hours away but here in Arizona things can get confusing.
Most of the state does not observe DST but the Navajo reservation in the north-east corner does.
Except the Hopi reservation, surrounded by the Navajo nation, does.
Except the Navajo enclave within the Hopi nation does not – presumably because judging by the size I’d say a half-dozen families at most live there and who knows what time they keep. A guidebook of the area said the best bet is to inquire locally.
It can make a difference because one time we tried to go to the Hubbell trading post and, forgetting they were on a different time, found it closed already.
In all the above posts, it’s assumed that the people involved at least know what time zones are and how they work.
Over at notalwaysright.com they have a steady stream of stories about nincompoops who have absolutely no clue how time zones work. (Sorry, there doesn’t seem to be a useful search function there to find some of them.)
I live in the far western part of the Eastern Time Zone, about 90 miles from the border with Central Time.
Not that I run into any confusion, it’s just great to benefit from extra useful daylight late in the day, compared to those poor souls on the Northeast coast.
Yeah not totally a time zone thing but the deal with Arizona…I live and work deep in the Pacific time zone in northern CA and work with people in AZ. Twice each year everyone is remembering/misremembering what time everyone is on, and usually leads to a few meetings being scheduled at inappropriate times for someone by mistake, until we all get things sorted-out until six months later. Rinse and repeat. Time to end DST for all.
There is the main Indiana time zone, which is Eastern and flips to DST when that comes around. That’s Indianapolis time.
A couple counties near Chicago follow Chicago’s time zone (that’s where I live). So it’s Central and flips to DST.
There’s a portion of the state that follows St. Louis, down near that metro area. Central flipping to DST. How, you ask, is that different than Northwest Indiana? As is said, it follows St. Louis - if, for example, St Louis dropped DST then so would Evansville. And likewise if Chicago dropped DST Lake and Porter county would, too. At present there is no real difference, but there could be in the future.
There are some rural areas that don’t do DST even if the rest of the state does. (Or at least the didn’t - I confess I have not delved deeply into this for a few years)
So… five different time zones. In practice, you’re either on Eastern or Central time, so no more than 1 hour difference, but sometimes you might be an hour ahead (or behind) a place that you share the same time with some other part of the year.
There can be a 2 1/2 hour time difference at the border between Western Australia and South Australia, when the latter is on Daylight time (WA is on Standard time year round). There are no settlements with over 100 people for hundreds of miles/km on either side of the border. (Eucla WA (pop. 58) is 7 mi/11 km from the border) I don’t know how drivers adjust to this, but when I took a train trip across Australia, we adjusted our watches by one hour every morning.