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"

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?")

[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.