Yes - and those states that do observe daylight-saving time (not all of them do) go over at different times. It is possible to drive due north and be in three different time zones in one day.

Scheduling conference calls with Australian colleagues is quite often a herculean undertaking.

my company had customer base from PR to HI. customers were registered by zip code. contact by correct time was pretty easy, as zip codes get larger as they go west.

the time here is 8:37am DC time.(it is a well known fact that DC is now the center of the universe).

i find it interesting on some of these posts that people ask how to do something when they are arriving at the airport at 7:05.???? and want to know how to get somewhere, and how long will it take.

I just use PT and ET (MT and CT are flyover time zones).

The only reason to remind people what time zone they are in, and what time zone I am in, is to possibly prevent yet another 6:00 AM PT phone call from some perky airhead who observes ET.

And then you deal with conference calls involving India and other locales offset from GMT by a fraction of an hour. This really confuses people I work with (large bank). I have to stop and think when a coworker asks me what that time difference is between India and their location - I have to remember whether I'm talking to someone in Sacramento, Tempe, Minneapolis, Charlotte or occasionally London. Gets old.

i despise the whole daylight-saving time crock so i do not invest mentally in these nuances

I always do the same and make no reference standard/daylight time.

For international correspondence, calls, emails, etc - I use GMT with a subset, as GMT never changes.

As my office is in Louisville, KY, I'll sometimes use the phrase "New York Time" (plus provide GMT subset) when on an international call, since many people don't know where Louisville is in the US.

When traveling in smaller cities, I'll sometimes use the terms "Chicago Time, Denver Time, and Los Angeles Time" as well, since those are the big cities most people know in each US/Canada time-zone (setting Atlantic, and HI/AK time aside).

Time zones & relaying correct info is important as I do a lot of international calling. Aside from my US #'s and US toll-free #'s, I have few incoming lines in other nations to make communications easier.

One thing that helps is prefixing the CallerID with the airport code for the city the incoming telephone # is located in. For example, if I get a local call on a Melbourne, Australia, line, my phone display reads:

MEL: <caller ID #>

In closing, it's important to get the time / time-zone correct.

Count me among those highly irritated to read about a meeting scheduled for 11:00 EST on July 15 in New York.

I find that the people who ignorantly mis-spout those abbreviations are the same people who are always out of pocket due to getting on board with paradigm shifts.

I often e-mail them back to ask "Do you really mean 11 am EST, which would be noon on everyone's watch in July?" I may be a bit less snotty, especially if the note is from a client, but I make sure they get the point.

My ex-FIL did NOT get time zones. While I was living in VA, he called from CA one Sunday afternoon. I answered the phone and he says "What are you doing?" I said I was watching the 49ers' game. He says "Me, too. Wow, is it still on back there?"

when I was living in Texas and working for a boss in California, I'd usually make my appointments in both time zones, usually a 3central/1pacific which makes it really clear as to what time we're talking about. I no longer have to use it since I had to move to California for an unrelated reason, but usually listing the times of all zones involved works well.

I've found that the best way to keep time zones straight is to use Google Calendar for scheduling in my home time zone (Japan) and TripIt for scheduling whenever I am out of the country -- more on that here.

The built-in world clock on the iPhone is really handy. I also use the FoxClocks extension for Firefox to keep London, New York and Tokyo time in the status bar of my web browser. London generally goes on daylight savings at the same time as the rest of Europe, and New York generally goes on daylight savings at the same time as most of the US (Indiana and Arizona excluded), so it's pretty easy to add or subtract hours from those two bases.

Usually I see people say something like "8 am New York, 1 pm London, 8 pm Hong Kong, 9 pm Tokyo" when scheduling a conference call, which is pretty clear for everyone.

Yes, it usually makes sense to make it understandable to everyone.

Where I would like everyone to understand CET, BST and EST, usually it's much more useful to say "14:00 Frankfurt, 13:00 London, 8:00 New York" and everyone gets it.

Remember that, when you are dealing with east Asia and North America, you also have to specify the day: "6 p.m. Thursday San Jose, 9 a.m. Friday Shanghai." And saying "tomorrow" is dangerous when people have different ideas of what "today" is.