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

[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.