I’ll say that when I was a stockbroker on the phone, I can’t tell you the amount of times every day I would give the hours of the stock market in eastern time, as we were always told to do.
I still found it amazing that so many people in Pacific time seemed stunned about how to convert it. Really? You’re 50 years old and the concept of time zones is foreign to you? Like it or not, the USA is still based off of Eastern Time. Oh and course, I can look at their call history and
notice that they always call right at market open for endless quotes and news.
On a plane if you go one time zone you notice the change. In the middle of the day the time changes. You get on the plane for a little over an hour and two hours are gone or no hours are gone.
Daylight savings is different. One day you get up and the sun is not up yet, the next day it is. Or you are getting home from work at dusk, but it is still light out. The next day it is dark when you get home. A sudden shock to your system.
On a ship It is not as drastic. The time change is at 0200. When you get up the sun is up a little earlier than the day before but not a full hour only part, or it is coming up just a little later.
What you will notice if you are going North or South a little is the sun is up longer or shorter depending on the time of year and direction. took a cruse from LA to Flordia I did not rally notice the length of daylight going. But flew home from Fort Lauderdale to San Jose. The next day I noticed the day was shorter.
When I was shipping I never noticed the time changes. That is unless it came on my watch. Either a 4 hour watch became 3 hours or a 4 hour watch became 5 hours. Now that I did notice.
(Regarding the claims that some people don’t know how time zones work.)
Over at https://notalwaysright.com, a compendium of anecdotes by customer-facing employes about stupid or obnoxious customers, this is a frequently recurring theme. It seems that there really are people out there who have no notion of how time zones work.
If you’re doing a transcontinental trip by land in Australia, you have to adjust to the weird time zones. Travelling by train from Sydney to Perth during Daylight Savings season, we had to change 30 minutes at the South Australia border, and then 2h30m at the Western Australia border (which has no DST).
That is indeed fascinating. I sense potential for a great mystery novel plot here, with someone committing a murder on board shortly before or after that re-setting, and getting a watertight alibi in the ensuing confusion as to what time, exactly, it was when the steward saw that person on the other deck.
I suppose if you have a set routine. The start and end of my day varies by more than an hour every day. I might get up at 6:00 one day and 7:15 the next. It just depends on where I have to be and what time I have to be there. As a result, my body doesn’t seem to notice the DST switch. Cross country flights (or longer) I do notice.
As noted above, the time difference is so small that it’s easily adjusted to. The effect was more of a curiosity, as exemplified by the Edgar Allan Poe story Three Sundays in One Week, or the denouemont of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.
D’Anconia, I’ve instructed you before not to ask pointless questions. That some people have difficulty setting their clocks right for daylight saving or calculating time zones is common knowledge. I find it difficult to imagine that you have never encountered this.
Ironically, despite your concern for other people providing cites, here you propose a practice for which you provide no cite or evidence yourself.
And I’ve instructed you before not to take snarky jabs at other posters.
Here is the text of instructions to you I posted a few months ago. In view of this, I am issuing you a warning for violating instructions and being a jerk.
Here’s an interesting citation, from Richard Feynman:
“It’s like when you’re rushing for an airplane, and you don’t know whether you’re late or not, and you just can’t make it, when somebody says, “It’s daylight saving time!” Yes, but which way? You can’t think in the excitement."
My mother was born in England and grew up hiding out in the London underground and later relative’s farms outside of London while the Germans dropped bombs in WWII.
After the war, she moved to the U.S. and came over by boat.
According to her, they spent an extra day in New York harbor (I think) just sitting still, not because of any jetlag type effects, but so that people could get used to walking on unmoving ground again. Apparently it takes a few days for people to get used to walking on a ship that is constantly rocking in the waves. Then, after a week of walking on a constantly rocking ship, people want to keep walking as if the ship is rocking, which makes them stumble like a drunken sailor once they get on land. Sitting still in a protected harbor so that the ship was no longer rocking gave people enough time to adjust that they walked normally after getting off of the boat.
Whether there were any other factors involved (immigration papers, some other type of bureaucratic delay, some sort of quarantine rule, etc) I have no idea. I just remember that according to my mother, they sat for a day so that people could walk again. That was apparently the biggest issue back in the day.
In this regard, I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in the 60s and 70s, and was bombarded with commercials on TV that advertised another show which would be broadcast on “Thursday at 10!(9 Central, 8 Mountain time)” Those ads drummed the math into me, and whenever I need to do a time zone conversion nowadays, that’s what my brain refers to. I honestly sympathize with today’s kids who have trouble figuring it out.
It was also a good Social Studies lesson, learning that the stations in the Eastern Central, and Mountain zones actually broadcast each show at the exact same time, but the folks in the midwest considered it to be early. And then the shows were broadcast 3 hours later for the West Coast people. It taught me a lot about bedtimes in parts of the country. I suppose it also taught me about generalizations.
Since I have experienced it, perhaps my comments are worth making. I took the Pushkin Montreal to London (yes we went up the Thames) in 1971 and we changed an hour a night till we got to London time. One hour was no problem at all; two nearly the same. By the time we got to the third successive hour change it was getting to be a bit tiresome. I am not sure it wouldn’t have been better to do five hours all at once. So yes, we experienced something like jet lag.
As for People not understanding time zones, let me tell you a little story my son told me. He was working on the very first version of NT. There was an app that would ring an alarm every day at 6:00 AM, say. Or every weekday if you chose that. What is a weekday? A Monday, Tuesday,…, or Friday you say. But NT was based on UT (= GMT) and it was already Saturday in London when it was 6:00 AM in Seattle, so your alarm wouldn’t ring. Not good. So he tried to explain the problem to a member of his programming team. The guy was incapable of wrapping his head around the idea that it could be Saturday in London and Friday in Seattle. So my son did that bit of programming himself. And you wonder why software sucks if such programmers are rampant.
A riddle: How is it possible for a clock in an Atlantic coastal state to correctly read the same time as a clock in a Pacific coastal state?
There is a small part of western Florida (the part under Alabama) that is on central time and a strip of eastern Oregon that is on mountain time. During the one night a year that the US is switching back to standard time, the clock in Florida is running from 2:00 AM to 3:00 AM for the second time, while the one in eastern Oregon is doing that hour for the first time
As a west-coaster, I’m trying to figure out why you believe this to be true. The stock market is, for historical and geographic reasons, and maybe you could claim that the federal government is as well for the same reasons, but what else? Nationally broadcast (live) events like football games or presidential debates seem to be timed knowing that there are large population centers in the Eastern and Pacific timezones, and splitting the difference in a way that generally annoys us both, unless you happen to be a eastern night owl or a morning-oriented westerner.
This may have come out snarkier than intended. What I mean is basically this: I’m an American, I live on the west-coast, and pretty much no aspects of my life are “based off of Eastern time.”
I keep forgetting that I spent 13 years working in the financial markets and I’m also a huge sports fan. So, yes the markets as well as economic news releases are definitely based on the East. Live sports played in the EST can start as early as 9 am Pacific. And, of course, a lot of large companies will schedule conference calls at 9 am EST, often so the VIPs can get in a round of golf after noon.
But, yes, I can definitely accept that there’s lot of people in the Pacific time zone who don’t have a life based on the East. It’s especially easy if you don’t care about the markets, have a serious interest in sports or work for a large company headquartered in the east
Serious sports fans could disagree. Personally, I’d rather be able to watch the end of a West Coast baseball game that starts at 7:00 pm in Seattle. When I lived on the East Coast I’d have to wait until the next morning to know who won. And Monday Night Football also ends at a reasonable hour on the West Coast.
I’m in California and I was always at work before 8am. A 9am conference call was fine by me. Give that, I am always awake by 7am even on the weekends. So a 9 or 10 am start for a sporting event on tv was perfect and baseball games almost never ended after 1:00 am. The west coast time zone was preferable for me when I watched sports.
