Time Zone Tango

2003-10-28 at 9:02 a.m.

One takes the time zone thing for granted. The Midwest? totally in the middle of things. Usually find to call the East Coast, and things in the West are earlier anyway, so work wise, things are fine, and late at night your friends in the West are still up and the folks in the East stay up later as a general rule, so you can always find someone awake somewhere.

Not so much out here. You have to time calls to the parents, for one thing, very very carefully. They go to bed RIDICULOUSLY early, so if you haven't called by 5:30 your time, don't bother. They'll be asleep--or just as good as. (Which can make things difficult when one works until 7.)

If you get phone disease at midnight, there is no one to call except people in your own time zone, and since you're getting old as it is, they're probably all asleep by now anyway.

And NPR, the bastards, still work on an East Coast timeline. Morning Edition ends at 9 A.M.! I ask you, does that sound reasonable? There's still THREE PERFECTLY GOOD HOURS OF MORNING LEFT. I don't even start thinking about listening to NPR until after about 8:30 on the mornings I'm working from home, so that by the time I turn it on it's on Classical Performances Today or something, with that guy who gets FAR too gleeful about a recent Prokofiev performance.

And regarding working from home: when working with East Coast or even Midwestern offices, the time zone difference SUCKS. I have so far gotten two calls to my home at 4 in the morning. The natural human reaction to a 4 o'clock phone call is "What? Huh? Oh my GOD SOMEONE IS DEAD OR IS IN JAIL AND I AM THEIR ONE AND ONLY PHONE CALL I MUST GET THIS NOW!" and it turns out some asshole forgot I work out of my home and thought it'd be wise to call first thing in the morning EAST COAST time because then he could leave a fucking voicemail instead of actually tALKING to me (this is a tool I used as well when I worked in an office--if you call someone back early enough, they may not be in but you can say, "I called you back!" and then it's THEIR fault you're playing phone tag). And in order to get people at their desk, you have to call FIRST THING in the morning over here, and even then it's donut time out there. So in order to get your work done you have to actually be FUNCTIONAL at 7 in the morning.

This just ain't me, people.

The one good outcome of the time-zone tango is that my sister in Paris is now 11 hours ahead. Which doesn't sound good, but it means at night, it'll be morning for her, and in the morning it's her evening. Which actually makes it MORE likely we get in touch.

(And with that in mind, the 10-10-9-8-7 shtick that John Stamos stumps for? TOTALLY worth it. I had one call to my sister that cost ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY FIVE DOLLARS. Then I used the finger-numbing prefix thingy, and a similarly-lengthed call cost $1.37. I shit you not. I don't understand it, but I don't CARE.)

As to the time zone thing, there's one more level of bizarreness: football games start at 10 a.m. It's just not right.

I can get used to it, but I SO don't understand how businesses can actually OPERATE out here. It's very bizarre.

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