Timezone, Shimezone

One of the things that bugs me is when an organizer who’s scheduling an international conference call uses the wrong timezone when he/she sends out the invitation.

Right now, it’s Daylight Savings Time in much of the United States, which means if you’re in the Eastern timezone it’s Eastern Daylight Time or EDT.

A couple weeks ago, I got a conference call invitation that listed…

Friday at 8am PST / 9am MST/ 10am CST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT / 5pm CET / 1am AUS

Um, am I really supposed to do the math to adjust the Standard time listings for Daylight Savings time? Or do I have to do a conversion to get the actual time?

Similarly it’s Summer time in Europe (CEST versus CET). And the UK is not on GMT for the summer, so the time you list there is one hour different than the actual time in the UK. Also, if I remember correctly there are multiple timezones in Australia, and there isn’t an AUS timezone.

The international groups that I meet with tend to publish one time and the timezone and leave it to individuals to figure out what their time is using a site like http://timeanddate.com. I wish more people would do that, or take extra care in putting out this information.

/rant off