Not nearly enough of a rant to put in the Pit, but it’s starting to get to me a bit.
I’ve been dealing with some people that either live on the other side of the country, or communicate with people who do. And I keep seeing e-mails that say things like “I’ll call you at 4:00 PST” or “Let’s set up a meeting for 7:00 EST.” So… what time would that be? Because this is, like daylight savings time. At least I’m not dealing with anyone from Arizona or Hawaii.
And I trust that Indianans have successfully made the transition.
He is and they should. I always make this mistake which is why unless it’s during the couple of weeks surrounding the time change I simply say 9am Eastern, 11am Mountain. During the couple of odd weeks I deliberately take the time to think about the correct time and ensure I’ve included enough information for those who don’t to figure it out.
I’ve run into this, as well. Usually it’s people who seem oblivious to the difference in abbreviation between, say, EST and EDT…and, in one case, I had to deal with a guy who was actively hostile in his insistence that there was “no such abbreviation” as EDT.
Here I was thinking we were going to discuss the validity of the concept and poke fun at the time when we wanted year-round daylight saving, as if that could be legislated.
Then I was wanting to switch to the legislated value of 3 for Pi.
Not long ago on a radio talk show somebody was railing against the Constitution versus the “Man Made Laws” that were being used to challenge it.
Isn’t it Ron White’s line that “You can’t fix stupid.”?
Since I know no one in any particular mass-meeting invite (myself included) can be trusted to get the whole time zone/DST thing right, I always write “…and we’ll all call in at 2:00 pm Eastern”.
Uhh, as an Arizonan, “Mountain” ends up meaning two different things to us. When DST is in effect almost everyone else in the Mountain Time Zone is an hour off from most (but not all) of the people in the state. I run into the same problems as the OP in trying to explain that we are still on MST even if they are on MDT.
(And I once had someone say “Oh, you switched to California time?” No, we didn’t switch at all, everyone else did!)
I think people should just use the abbreviations ET/CT/MT/PT except when dealing with Arizona. There’s one less character to write, and they are correct all year round.
I understand the difference, I just don’t care that much. As far as I’m concerned, daylight saving time IS standard at this time of year.
I can barely remember to change the clocks, I really can’t be bothered to stop and think about which letter to type on a particular day. It hasn’t been a problem so far, most of the people I deal with always use ST instead of DT also.
Now, part of that may be because I don’t generally work with people in Arizona or Hawaii, or other countries except Canada, so it’s really not a critical piece of information.
And put me down for staying on DT all year (or moving standard time up if you’d rather think that way). Who cares about light in the morning, I’m just driving to work. Give me light in the evening, when I can use it!
on review: I could go with the two-letter designations, if anyone would understand them.
I don’t remember whether this is my dumb cousin (probably) or an old friend of mine . . . but someone I’ve known thinks that different time zones = actually different TIMES. Like if you call someone in the next time zone, you have to wait an hour for them to hear you. And yes, this means that sometimes you hear something that hasn’t been said yet.
It must be strange to talk face-to-face with someone with the zone boundary right between you.
I’ll just offer what we do here where I work, which is the public television network in Kentucky. We have both Eastern and Central time zones here, and we broadcast statewide. All our listings follow this format:
Nova “The Deadliest Plane Crash”
Tuesday, July 13 at 8/7 pm CT
8 is understood as being Eastern Time and “7 pm CT” is Central Time. I’ve worked here 20 years and it’s always been rendered this way.
Every conference call invitation I receive at work specifies Standard Time…all year long. WTF is up with that? If they’re going to bother with appending those extra three letters, how hard is it to get it right?
I agree. It can sometimes be frustrating dealing with the change in time zone differences. For example, we have to remember that cities such as Denver are an hour ahead of us instead of the same time. The Central zone runs two hours ahead of us and the Eastern zone runs three hours ahead.
What’s weird is that we’re now on daylight saving time for more of the year than we are on “standard” time. You’d think that if the way we’re doing it now really were more efficient, then the standard working hours would have been 8-4 instead of 9-5 in the first place.
Similar to Lare’s point about Arizona, there’s also potential for confusion when dealing with foreigners. Like most of the US, the UK (for instance) springs ahead and falls behind, so there’s usually 5 hours difference between the eastern US and England, winter or summer. But they change on different days than we do, so there’s a period of a week or two in the spring and fall where it doesn’t match up.
