Time Zones are Confusing

I got up this morning, excited that my friend Greg and I had plans to Skype today. He had said he was free on Wednesday after 4:00pm, so we made plans for 4:30pm his time. I automatically took into account the 17 hour time difference, coming up with 9:30am my time. So I logged on to Skype, and then waited rather impatiently, knowing that every minute I waited for him was a wasted minute of our Internet usage. (The hotel owners are actually giving us free Internet, but I think that they have a limited amount for the whole hotel for the month, so we are still trying to use as little as possible.) Anyway, after 15 frustrating minutes of no Greg on Skype, it finally hit me that 4:30pm Wednesday is 9:30am Thursday!! So instead of Greg being 15 minutes late, I was a full day early. Sorry, Greg.

In light of this rather irritating experience, I though I would take a minute to talk about time differences. NZ is actually west of the USA, which makes me think it should be earlier here. But, since we crossed the International Date Line somewhere over the Pacific, it is actually “tomorrow” at all times here, from an American perspective. J I like that idea, but in reality, the time difference is rather frustrating. 17 hours ahead means that in our work day (assuming an 8:00 to 5:00 schedule) is from 3:00pm to midnight Kansas time. We became very familiar with this while we were still in Kansas, as these were the times of day when we could expect to be contacted by J’s colleagues in NZ. Now that we’re in NZ, it’s a different story. Now what it means is that if we want to call people in Kansas in the evening their time, which is usually most convenient for them, that is between 10:00am and 2:00pm our time. Unfortunately, that is the middle of the work day for us. Not a huge problem for me at the moment, but I intend to be working eventually, and I think, at that point, we will largely be left with weekend opportunities for Skype and calling. Which is not terrible, except that we are always busy on the weekends, and I don’t want to try to jam everyone I want to talk to into a small amount of time. During our stay at the hotel, we are not going to do much Skyping anyway, but we are getting unlimited Internet at our house, so then the limiting factor will be the time zone frustrations. And, of course, just finding time to do it anyway, with how busy we are. But I’m sure that we will work out a system, and confident that I will eventually stop logging in on entirely the wrong day. J