Berlin
Helping run Travel Talk on Twitter, a worldwide Twitter chat, has made me acutely aware of the vagrancies of time zones.
It’s amusing to me that the Grammar Nazis of the world don’t see fit to jump on the abuse of PST/EST. Perhaps it’s just because of an elitist anti-Daylight Savings mentality.
Right now, it’s Daylight Savings in North America. That means, if you’re scheduling an appointment with me at 8 AM, Los Angeles time, you’re scheduling it for 8 AM PDT. Not 8 AM PST. The ‘S’ stands for ‘standard’. The ‘D’ is ‘daylight’. When we’re springing forward, falling back and all that jazz, don’t just change your clock, change what you’re typing.
And if you really want to avoid all of it, just write 8 AM PT or 8 AM ET, etc. (Pacific time, Eastern time)
Here’s a bit of info/trivia to leave you with:
- The first time zone in the world was established on December 1, 1847, by railroad companies in the UK.
- GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) doesn’t change. When the UK moves their clocks forward, they are no longer on GMT, but rather BST (British Summer Time).
- Technically, there is a difference between GMT and UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).
- UTC does not correspond to its English acronym to allow for it to be non-language specific.
- France and its territories have more time zones than the United States and its territories (11 vs. 10).
- Since the Communist Revolution, all of China is one time zone. Before 1949, it had 5 time zones.
- Some places are increments of x.5 hrs off of UTC. Afghanistan is UTC+04:30, India and Sri Lanka are UTC+05:30. Nepal is UTC+05:45. The Chatham Islands are UTC+12:45.
My favorite site for time zone problems, meeting planning, etc. is timeanddate.com. I’ve used it many a time to figure out when to call people overseas and to make sure that I’m not totally off. Also, if you type in something like “time in NYC” into Google Search, it’ll pop up right away in Search without needing to go to another site.
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