time zones: there's more than one

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

i'm in the office 9 to 5. i take support calls from 10 to 5. i live and work in Seattle, Washington, i.e. in the Pacific Time Zone. this is in the help/about file, this is on our webpage, this is printed on our documentation.

now, i've lived in more time zones than anyone really should, so maybe i'm just "special". you know, like i was "special" in primary school. maybe i have a gift for adding and subtracting, or something, who knows...which is funny because i suck at math.

it says on our message, which i have hacked so you cannot skip it, that "we're here 10am to 5pm Pacific, which is 1pm to 8pm Eastern, and 1700 to 0000 GMT." when you call us you're calling a 206 (Seattle) or 604 (Vancouver) phone number. there are plenty of clues here.

the proper way to deal with this is of course to leave a voicemail or send an email to the email address repeated twice in the message.

of course what ends up happening at least once a week is a festival of whining, bellowing, guilt, and insanity. WHY AREN'T YOU PICKING UP THE PHONE? being this morning's. why? because it's 4:30 in the bloody morning and i am asleep and the phone is turned off so i won't get woken up. leaving me seven messages before 8am Pacific, that's really classy. usually there's some suggestion as to our laziness or disregard, which is pretty precious. did i get an email? of course not. when i go to call back, i get the "I'm in the office but I presently am unable to take calls." message which then in turn doesn't let me leave a message.

he then calls the main number and literally screams at my sales person. good work, buttmunch. what was his question? something from page 2 of the 6-page manual. of course he lectures me for three minutes about how "you people need to be there regardless of bull**it time zones."

lemme call congress, i think they have control over time zones, right?

Comments

[agmlego.livejournal.com]

For more timezone fun, try going to school on the Keewenaw Peninsula (sticks up off the UP of MI, in the center of Lake Superior) with your family in Milwaukee. Though the Keewenaw is west of Milwaukee, because it is part of MI, it is on EST, while Milwaukee is on CST. I got so many late-night calls--"Oh, I am sorry, I thought it was "

Add to that the fact that, during the winter, the Keewenaw typically only has around six hours of daylight a day, and it becomes quite interesting going to school two miles past the end of the Earth (http://static.flickr.com/117/293562774_680e983afa.jpg)...

--
"Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem"

[agmlego.livejournal.com]

Amend that quote to be "Oh, I am sorry, I thought it was <some time an hour before current>"

/me forgot that LJ strips out things that appear to be HTML tags if they are not valid HTML...

--
"Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem"

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

The worst part is that i knew you were talking about Houghton before i even clicked. (My sister's wife went to Michigan Tech. You might remember her as one of four lesbians in the Yoop.)

I understand six hours of daylight too well. That's winter in Seattle. However, the 19.5 hour summer days when it's 70F and sunny with no humidity every day for five months make up for it in spades. I can't be in the sun much anyways (and not just because i'm that goth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeroderma_pigmentosum)) but it's still visually stunning.

[agmlego.livejournal.com]

Mm...I do not think that that is a bad thing, that you knew about Houghton. It is, after all, pretty much the largest collection of people (and especially technically-oriented people) on the Keewenaw. I probably do not remember your sister, actually, as I just finished my first year there, but it is possible I have heard of her.

Amen to that. I love summers in the UP, because you just cannot beat the low (or no) humidity unless you go to the desert, and that is way too hot for my tastes.

--
"Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem"

[argonel.livejournal.com]

To continue blowing peoples minds. A significant part of my decision to go to school at MTU was because it was warmer than studying closer to home.

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

How appropriate, since i think Leavenworth is indeed Hell. That's even a proper German name...

I kid, i kid.

I have relatives in Crackima. You want insanely hot? However, they have an Arctic Circle and thus i can get my fry sauce. I miss Arctic Circle in White Center.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

So what type of engineering did you study? Target, weapon system, gEEk or other?

[jecook]

Indeed.

There was a story I heard a number of years ago about a town that sat on the navajo reservation in Arizona- the place you worked at ran in Navajo time (Mountain time), but the bank on the other side of town that you used ran on MST with corporate, so you'd be screwed when you got out of work and had to put your paycheck in.

May not be true, but it's amusing.

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

Never heard that one but there is a related one with the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam sits right on the Colorado River which is the natural boundary of Arizona and Nevada. Arizona does not observe daylight savings time while Nevada does. The Hoover Dam has to observe both time regions because it has to time spin-up/spin-down of the generators with the loads (spin-up at 4:30 PM each local time to catch the people going home).

There's even a marker in the floor of the office corridor inside the Dam that shows the state line and marks the time zones. Almost everywhere inside the Dam there are two clocks on the walls.

[taiaselene.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm originally from Phoenix, and never experienced DST until I went to college.

But yes, the Indian reservations in Northern Arizona *do* observe daylight saving time. But the chance that a bank would be in the same town but not on the reservation sounds odd to me. There's fuck all in and around the reservations.

TIme is hard. Let's have a meeting...

[greylady.livejournal.com]

Because it's time is "complicated"

There's GMT, but the most of the world shifts one hour to the plus for "Summer" time, so right now anyone in London is in BST, or GMT+1. But a lot of people think "London is GMT" and figure their conversions wrong. Worse is when people schedule things with international colleagues in BST and call it GMT...

Tech support eventually kills all faith in humans. Even more scary is how many people just use the wrong time zone name. ("I'm in EST"... "No, you're in EDT - Eastern Daylight Time."... "Daylight Time? What's that?" ... "It's the reason you changed your clocks... you did change your clocks, right?")

Re: TIme is hard. Let's have a meeting...

[aylinn.livejournal.com]

not if they're in indiana.

That always throws me.

Re: TIme is hard. Let's have a meeting...

[naggy.livejournal.com]

Not anymore. Indiana has DST. And the governor may lose the election based on fighting for DST. Go figure.

Re: TIme is hard. Let's have a meeting...

[ace-brickman.livejournal.com]

fellow Hoosier?

Re: TIme is hard. Let's have a meeting...

[naggy.livejournal.com]

Texan living in Indiana. I also did tech support/QA for a state system, where we had to compensate for the fact that some counties in Indiana were in Central and unofficially observed DST (around Chicago), most were Eastern Standard, and some counties were Eastern Standard observing DST (around Cinci). Talk about insane.

PS: Getting the e-mail for this with the default subject line made me wonder if it was spam at first. :)

Re: TIme is hard. Let's have a meeting...

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

Oh, i know about BST. I just know GMT is a good reference point, and sometimes people do the BST=GMT thing you mentioned.

I greatly dislike DST; i live at the west edge of a timezone and way north, and extending it only made it worse, on top of being out of sync with the rest of the world.

Re: TIme is hard. Let's have a meeting...

[nem0.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that DST is kind of useless now that we've got electric lights and we're not trying to maximize farming/ranching time during the day.

I like how they shifted DST to save power, except that instead of turning the lights on earlier in the evening, people end up turning them on earlier in the morning, making the whole thing a wash overall. PROGRESS.

[agentdanak.livejournal.com]

call him back at 2 in his morning and listen to him have to suck it up when you explain that 'oh, i thought you'd mentioned that we shouldn't care about bull**** timezones, so i'm just following up...'

sorry, i'm at work. can you tell?

:)

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

there's a fix for that... offer 24/7 support at astronomical prices...

[attackgypsy.livejournal.com]

This was a few years ago, but I worked for a jewelry company that had stores Nationwide, and I was on the East Coast.

The latest we worked was until 7.

Then they rolled out a new POS system, and instituted a new hours system. 8 am to midnight. And they left people on that shift, like me, for 15 months.

Problem was, after 6pm, no one called. Ever.

Finally, they rolled it back to 8 pm. I quit about 3 months later, after listening to the Director of IT brag about being a coder when he couldn't even clear the cache on his browser.