It’s All in the Timing

/ cagedunn

Daylight timing, that is. I have the dubious honour of travelling through seven time zones in a 4-day period once. Training people, so needing to be on my toes, functioning, and fully alert in each location. Add to that managing travel times to and from airports, gathering the tools together, finding the right place to be, checking through the security stuff at gates and buildings and storage, making sure everything worked before people turned up … and then checking that those who signed up actually turned up. Some didn’t. Way too important, apparently, to take account of the less valuable time of others.

Seven time zones. And that wasn’t even anything to do with daylight saving.

A week later, I was still zoned out and couldn’t adjust to the time I was in.

Which is a real monster in a world of global meetings.

I think I’d be used to it after so much of the above palaver, but no, it’s still happening.

It’s the Zoom meetings – or whatever the appropriate meeting software is for the specific purpose. So many time zones in the world, and they don’t all change on an agreed date, at an agreed time, and I have meetings this Friday in two different time zones, except one of them either went into or came out of daylight saving and now I have two meetings that overlap.

And it’s still at Oh-Bloody-Dark-Hundred in this part of the world.

Daylight saving drives me nuts. Not because there’s a change in the time on the clocks, but because each time zone seems to want to have their own date and time for reverting back to what standard time is. Or was.

So, in defiance of the concept of Daylight-Bloody-Saving and Independent Time Zone misalignment, I’m resigning from the world for as long as it takes for the time zones to come back into some form of alignment.

And that’s it, goodnight, and I hope the extra darkness/light/whatever, doesn’t kick your butt too hard.

18 thoughts on “It’s All in the Timing”

  1. I’m hearing you, Cage. In a past life, I faced similar challenges and the World Clock Meeting Planner was my boon companion because it automatically made all of those adjustments. Still didn’t make phone meetings at midnight any easier to cope with. 😉

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  2. Fortunately I don’t have to travel through this time maze. On the other hand, our dogs do not operate on daylight savings time, so their inner clocks do not automatically re-set with changes in the weather. When we spring forward it’s not so bad, but falling back does not give us an ‘extra’ hour for anything but listening to irate dogs demanding food, outdoor time and an earlier bedtime. I have no idea what the answer is, but I hate the switch.

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    • Yes, it can be difficult to keep track and attend the meeting on time – they get miffed if someone logs on an hour or so beforehand just to be sure …

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  5. Before I retired I lived in California (still do) and many of my coworkers and clients lived on the east coast and would schedule conference calls for 8 am their time, which was 5 am my time. I also had associates and clients in Europe, and finding times that worked for everyone was a real challenge. And if we have to continue to change the clocks twice-yearly, it would be nice, as you pointed out, if every place around the globe did it on the same dates. Nice rant, Cage.

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  7. I like the idea of Universal Time. One zone for the whole bloody planet … but can you imagine, trying to get all those ‘important people’, to even consider the idea of the concept of contemplating such a thing! … even before it goes to a committee!

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