The U.S. Government Printing Office switched midnight from p.m. to a.m. in the 2008 edition of their style guide. Which other people recommend that convention? The U.S. NIST recommends, more sensibly, to avoid the ambiguity by not using the expressions “12 a.m.” or “12 p.m.”, instead to write things like “the business is open from 3:30 p.m. until midnight”. Also, 0000 vs 2400, using a 24-hour clock, is one suggested way of distinguishing the beginning from the end of a given civil day.
Decimal time never caught on in the West, but maybe it would have suited you, because it never goes past 10.
OK, that was just badly phrased :o I meant, switching from duodecimal time to decimal time is easy, because there is no 1800 versus 8 p.m. to worry about. Noon becomes 5 o’clock, though, there is that to get used to (many people are already familiar with 0.5 = 1/2)
I voted “no” but not because I don’t understand it. Dad worked for NATO, and we lived in Europe when I was a teenager.
I don’t mind it, but I don’t want to be using a different standard than my colleagues and have to translate every mention of times, mentally or verbally.
Metric didn’t catch on in the US because it was a top-down attempt to change our way of thinking. Moving to 24 hour time will be the same thing.
While I voted preferring 24 hour time, in English conversation, I always use a.m./p.m. or morning/evening/afternoon. 24 hour time is more what I like to set my clocks to (phone, car, computer, etc.) In other languages, it depends on what the colloquial standard is. A lot of countries use the 24-hour as an official standard, but in colloquial speech will revert to 12-hour time commonly (like in Polish and Hungarian.)
[del]When[/del] If I become dictator of the universe, I will command everyone to use 24-hour time. Until then, I’m not going to fuss about it.
I worked at a software company for nearly 30 years that over time acquired or became part of larger acquisitions with companies all over the world. When you’re trying to coordinate meetings across seven or eight international timezones plus most of the ones in North America, 24 hour UTC time is the only way to not make yourself crazy (same reason the military has traditionally done it.) Now that I’ve been retired a few years I find myself reverting to 12-hour time in most contexts, but I still set all computing devices to 24-hour.
I have long ranted that the am/pm thing is stupid. It’s a 24 hour day so 24 hour time is completely logical. But like adapting to the metric system some people just refuse to be reasonable.
I definitely prefer it and have always set up my mobile phones to use 24-hour time. That way I never have to worry about inadvertently using the wrong suffix when entering things into my calendar.
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I’m confused. Are you saying there was a time in your life when it was not common usage that 12am was midnight and 12pm was noon?
It’s unreasonable to expect people to be reasonable.
I hate 24 hour time descriptions too. When it’s used, I have to think about it for a moment before it registers.
IT guy here and give me 24 hours.
AM/PM is just another data entry field to have to deal with. Either as a programmer or a user.
The first thing I do when I get a new watch is to change it to 24-hour time. I have been doing this for the past 40 years.
I think some of those clocks like to have noon at the top of the dial, so that the day occupies the top half of the dial. It makes a kind of sense, I guess, especially if the clock also shows the position of the sun and moon.
I’m now thinking of getting one of those watches. I’d never heard of them before. 
Re: Southern Standard Time… many of the machines at my work have a clock display for the operator. Problem was, on many assembly lines where there were multiple machines, the clocks were all at different times and even ran at different rates, none of which corresponded to the actual time we were clocking in and out with. We referred to this as “Robot Standard Time”.
I got one! A Svalbard model AA22 ‘Noir’. It arrived today. Well, technically, ‘yesterday’, but because of the shift I work, I’m still up.
And in other 24-hour-related news, I wanted to set my Fitbit Ionic to 24-hour time. Nope. No way to change it on the watch. No way to change it in the Fitbit app on my phone. I had to log in to my Fitbit account and dig through several layers of menus to find the choice of 12- or 24-hour time among the ‘advanced’ settings.
Now that I work from home and we often have well planned or less planned online conferences, the use of the 24 hour clock has become ubiquitous. People seem to prefer it so that there will be no mishaps.
I don’t prefer 24-hour time but am used to it after having lived in Thailand for 25 years. As for 12am and 12pm, I always considered midnight as a.m. and noon as p.m. But at both the English-newspapers I worked at in Bangkok, the paper used 12-hour time in stories, and we were specifically banned from ever using 12am or 12pm unless it was in a quote. We were always to use “12 midnight” and “12 noon.” Part of the reasoning was that they’re both really in between a.m. and p.m.
I was thinking about that today at work. Technically, according to the meaning of a.m.and p.m., wouldn’t 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. both refer to midnight? 12 a.m. would be the midnight before noon, and 12 p.m. would be the midnight after noon.
Now, I know we don’t use them that way. And I don’t remember whether noon is declared to be 12 am or 12 pm.
And the whole using the hour of 12 plus additional minutes for the first hour after noon or midnight tends to obscure things. 11:00 am… 11:59 am… 12 noon… 12:01 pm… 1:00 pm.
Now that I look at that, it would make more sense to say 11 am… 11:59 am… noon… 0:01 pm… 1:00 pm. The 12 would be replaced by 0.
Midnight would work the same. 11 pm… 11:59 pm… midnight… 0:01 am… 1:00 am.
To the extent this is true, it is only so for an incalculable, infinitesimally small amount of time. So small as to be essentially zero (whatever units for time you may chose). After that precise, incalculable moment, it is truly a fraction of a second after 12. If you see 12:00 on the clock, by the time your brain has figured it out, it’s already after 12:00 (it’s just not 12:01 yet—that needs more than a moment).
That said, I prefer 24-hr time.