Time Zones
 

Are you a stickler about the correct use of time zones?

As a business traveler I feel obligated to keep up-to-date with time zones and Daylight Saving Time observances.

My sales people (even the travelers) don't.

When I send an appointment I typically say "Eastern" to indicate that I'm talking about the current Eastern observance. My coworkers like to use EST all year which I feel is incorrect.

Now we're talking about a client in AZ. AZ is technically MST or "Arizona Time" all year. Sales person talks about "this is the one place in AZ that doesn't observe DST". I'm confused by her comment and proceed to give her a diatribe about time zones for the second time in a week.

Does anyone else who regularly manages multiple time zones for scheduling and catching flights feel the same way?

I'm sure that it is shortly after 5:30 pm somwhere in the world. Accordingly, I'm going home. ;)

On a more serious note, however, I can see how dealing with multiple sets of time zones could cause some havoc and require attention to detail. Perhaps after some people in your sales team miss their flight due to their EST/EDT (or the like) confusion they'll learn that little details matter.

By "one place in AZ" does this sales person mean all of AZ other than the Navajo Nation?

No. She's talking about someone in Ft. Defiance so I am assuming she is talking about the one place that actually observes DST...but I don't like assuming.

I always refer to it by state/city name.

If I was doing a call or something with people in Colorado, California, and New York I would say

Noon (New York), 10 am (Denver), 9 am (San Francisco)

But that's because when I was doing it all the time the people I was working with were not smart enough to handle the entire MST DST thing without having to ask.

Getting the zone and DST code correct is getting critical these days especially since the recent "tweaks" have the US and the rest of the world in flux twice a year (different change dates).

I will say EST year round but also will say the place for other time zones.

Right. If I were doing a lot of international calls I'd probably use GMT offsets.

I am a huge stickler for time-zone acumen! I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one.

US time is relatively easy - it gets a bit tricky in the UK because most people don't realise that the UK is on GMT only when daylight-saving time is not in effect (this is because GMT, or more correctly UTC, never changes); during the summer, the British Isles are on BST (British Summer Time).

However, on the continent, the time zone is CET all year round even though it changes for daylight-saving time as well.

Let's not even get started on Australia and New Zealand.

I keep my watch on UTC wherever I am in the world and simply manage calculations as +/- whatever hours from UTC.

When writing times, I always write them in 24-hour clock with "z" at the end to denote Zulu time. It gets questioned sometimes like when signing in/out of a building, but after I explain the Zulu time concept to the security guard they usually shake their head and let me go.

This reminds me of a SNAFU when I lived in Las Vegas. I was taking seaplane flying lessons in Bullhead City, AZ. I was unaware at the time that AZ had any deviation from standard time protocol. I was also shamefully unaware that it wasn't in the same time zone as NV (I had only moved out there a month earlier). On the first day of instruction, I was two hours late because of the time zone and DST difference. On the following weekend, I showed up an hour early because the switch from DST/ST occurred during that week.

All day long I listen to a support rep in an adjoining cube say "That's 8pm PST" when it fact we're PDT right now.

I always just say "8pm Pacific" or "8pm Pacific Time"

Me too. I also always notice when people say "CST" in the summer and mentally dock them a couple points for it.

Indiana - love it or leave it (but be sure to tell people which time zone you are operating on when you do) - Despite the last round of changes, the state is still split between Eastern and Central, though it does observe DST throughout. A couple of state-wide companies I know refer to Company Time, picking one time zone or the other for all meeting announcements. Of course, I always forget which one they use, and have to call to verify each time anyway, but at least there is internal consistency.

Having a history of business travel to AZ, I also enjoy the point on the Hoover Dam where there are 2 clocks, one with NV time(Pacific, does DST), and one with AZ time (Mountain, no DST). So half the year they are the same.

But if you really want inconsistency, check out the time zones in Australia...

Didn't Indiana change all to one? I remember years ago when seperate counties would choose not to observe DST and it would really screw things up when traveling through.

I am a stickler for people who don't use the D for daylight time.

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?" :rolleyes:

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.