Can anyone describe how it is to live near a time line? I have now idea how it really is but it seems it would be a real pain if, for instance, your job is over the line, or the blockbuster. How about TV schedules if you have just an antenna? Can you watch Friends twice? Seems like a pain in the rear…
I used to work at a newspaper in Nebraska that was just on the Central side of the Central/Mountain time line. Since our coverage area extended into both times, we had to be careful about getting the time right if, say, there was a meeting over in Mountain Time. And we did have the unusual “10/11 News” – because some people were seeing it at 11 and some at 10.
When I was stationed at Fort Benning, along the Chatahoochee River, some of the Soldiers would go over to party in Phenix City, Alabama so they could party one extra hour. Some of the less intelligent individuals would roll their watches back an hour to show local time (in Phenix City) and then forget to correct it when they returned to the fort.
Didn’t we just have a thread on this? I have lived twice in towns right next to time zone changes. Both times my wife and I lived in Mountain Time. In the second, we lived in Mountain time and worked in Central Time.
There were no spectacular problems. Basically, we set our watches and clocks to central time and functioned that way. As a matter of fact, there were definite advantages to the set up. When I got off work at 5 p.m. or so, it was only a little after 4 p.m. when I got home thus all the stores in town were open and I didn’t have to run around to get to shops at the last minute. Traffic was less conjested since “rush” hour was spread over a wider period of time and the the eating places in town liked it too. Rather than a single “rush” hour, they had their dinner hour spread over a wider range of time.
In addition, since everyone in the area knew about the time change just minutes away, everyone allowed for it. The only exceptions were people from out of the area. They would consistently show up an hour early or late, but for the most part, the locals made exceptions for their ignorance.
When there was a local event like a concert, play or parade, the local papers published the times of the event in both central and mountain times, just to be on the safe side.
In regard to television, we had cable feeds from both mountain and central time. If you really liked a program once, you had a very good chance of catching it a second time on the mountain version.
TV
I don’t live near a time line, but there is one amusing advantage to them. On cbc.ca, they have RealAudio feeds for CBC Radio programming from different cities across the country. Depending on what’s convenient for me, I can listen to the World at Six at 5 (from Halifax), 6 (from Montreal), 7 (from Winnipeg), 8 (from Calgary), or 9 (from Vancouver.)
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=64680
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=29347
We used to have terrible trouble with time lines until the fifth Doctor came by and got rid of that annoying hyperdimensional being who kept rewriting history. We still get into lots of arguments about who really won the 1962 World Series however.