After overhearing an argument between two fellow geeks at my work, I’ve decided to try a little personal experiment. I am going to change my life over to UTC (formerly GMT) coordinates.
If you don’t know what UTC is (come on is there really anybody that doesn’t?) it is a universally accepted “global time” for Earth based in Greenwich, England. The various time zones on the Earth are expressed in offsets from UTC. For example, in my former time zone, EST/EDT the time right now would be 7:14PM/8:14 PM in standard and daylight savings time respectively. The offsets are -5:00/-4:00 respectively.
Daylight savings time and time zones make life difficult for programmers, TV networks, people with alarm clocks, travelers, airlines, etc. The whole world would be better off if we all agreed on UTC. Sure, this means I’d go to bed around 06:00 (1:00 AM EST) typically and wake up around 15:00 (10:00 AM EST) but I could get used to that quickly. People in other parts of the world would go to bed and wake up at much different times, but if I wanted to schedule an interstate meeting over the internet, I could say it’s at 17:00 and no matter where on the globe you were, you’d know when I was talking about.
So anyway, I’ve adjusted my phone and my computers over to UTC and we’ll see how difficult my life becomes. It’ll be a pain cause I’m still dealing with people in time zones but maybe I can adjust.