A couple of weeks ago, I called the Technical Support department of a company whose software I use under license. I had come across another "bug" or something of the sort. The on-duty representative suggested that I contact a specialist and promised that they would call me at 11 a.m. I agreed and waited. It's already 11:20, and there's no call. I call them myself and find out they are in Houston, where the time is an hour earlier: when it's 11 for them, it's already 12 in Boston and time to have lunch. It seems like a trivial matter, but time is lost; nobody is really to blame: the agent didn't ask in which time zone I was, and it escaped my notice.
Another instance: a couple of years ago, returning home from a business trip in New Mexico, my flight was canceled. The town was small, and the next flight was only tomorrow. Yet, all is not lost! In the city of Odessa, a hundred miles away, there's a large airport with a flight to Boston at 8 p.m., and it's only 4 p.m. now. My colleague Kevin is stuck with me; we buy new tickets, get in the car, and drive to Odessa on a beautiful highway with nonexistent traffic. We arrive in an hour and a half and decide, as we approach the airport, that we have an hour to have dinner at a restaurant, without extravagance: the famous local brisket and a mug of beer. Whole and in good spirits, we enter the airport: the bright electronic clock on a tall pole shows 7:32. – What the f-k! Why?! - Well, buddy, because this Odessa is in Texas and has a one-hour time difference with New Mexico, but not in our favor. Boarding is already completed; the staff didn't let us on the plane, the tickets are gone, and the next flight is only tomorrow, déjà vu.
Almost everyone can recall such examples of temporal mismatches and hitches: sometimes it's an inconvenience and wasted time, but sometimes more severe, like being late for an interview or a date. And all because of time zones, which, I dare say, seem to me the greatest human folly – a senseless waste of resources and a complication of an already complex life.
The history of the issue dates back to ancient times: "...on the first day, God created the sky and the earth, water and light, and separated light from darkness." Time for all nations is associated with the movement of the Sun around the Earth. That it's not quite so, rather than quite the opposite, became known relatively recently and doesn't change the situation. As long as people didn't travel long distances, especially on jet planes, there were no serious problems with time. In each locality, time was determined by sundials, based on the Sun's passage through the zenith – noon, and clocks were set to 12:00. On any meridian, noon occurs at the same time unless it's night, but if you move in a latitudinal direction, it shifts by 1 hour for every 15 degrees. For example, in terms of longitude, Boston and New York differ by 3 degrees, and two hundred years ago, a New Yorker arriving in Boston adjusted his watch 12 minutes ahead. The problem arose in England in the mid-19th century when railways connected cities on different meridians, where local time differed by 15-30 minutes.
To avoid confusion in scheduling, it was proposed to introduce a unified time throughout the island, determined by the Greenwich Meridian, also known as the Zero Meridian.
It worked well and conveniently, and other countries also began to introduce "Unified Time" for themselves, initially for railway schedules and later legislatively for the entire population. Again, a problem arose: the island of Great Britain is relatively tiny and spreads for about 8 degrees from west to east, but in America, it turned out that with unified time, noon in Boston is at 12, while in San Francisco, it's 3 p.m. Roughly speaking, everyone somehow wanted noon to be at 12 for them. Then engineer Sanford Fleming proposed the idea of 24 time zones, each covering 15 degrees of longitude. In 1884, at an international conference in Washington, time zones were approved, and the Greenwich Meridian was accepted as the midpoint of the zero zone. At the same time, the beginning of a new day was no longer considered noon, as before, but midnight.
According to this system, the new day began at the 180th meridian, which runs from the North Pole to the South Pole through sparsely populated areas of the Pacific Ocean. They called this imaginary line the "International Date Line" - crossing it from west to east, you entered yesterday, the past, and from east to west, you entered the future, tomorrow. This situation can somehow be reconciled in London, but not everyone likes it locally. Fortunately (jokingly), compliance with international time zones is not mandatory for local jurisdictions. For example, the International Date Line (IDL) passes almost precisely through the Bering Strait, separating Russian Chukotka from American Alaska, and that's correct: two worlds living in two different days. However, the Aleutian Islands ended up in the Eastern Hemisphere, and to make it more convenient for American citizens, the IDL in this area was shifted 500 miles to the west.
If something is not prohibited, it is allowed, and the leaders of the Kiribati islands moved this unfortunate IDL to the east by a whole two time zones. So, crossing a certain line drawn on the water surface, you end up not in 24 but in 25 hours in the future. On the Internet, I found an exciting consequence of this situation: if it's now 10 a.m. on Friday in London, 5 a.m. on the same day in Boston, Thursday 11 p.m. on the distant Midway base in the Pacific Ocean, then on Christmas Island, belonging to Kiribati, Saturday has already begun – 1 a.m. Some folks say that Kiribati moved the IDL so drastically to attract tourists – they created another wonder out of nothing. Indeed, it's cool to step over the Greenwich Meridian and move from one hemisphere to another; I myself have experienced such a weird situation.
The International Date Line does not affect the majority of humanity, and captains of sea vessels and airplanes automatically adjust their clocks when crossing the 180th meridian without bothering about the territory of the island nations they fly over. But let's return to time zones. Of course, everyone knows there are not 24 of these zones, as one might expect by dividing the 360 degrees of Earth's circumference by 15 degrees. "Well, how many are there then?" The answer depends on the time of year. For example, today, as I write this story, there are 38 of them, but in a couple of weeks, on the first day of Farvardin month when Iranian mullahs announce the switch to daylight saving time, there will be 37 because in that case, Iranian time will coincide with the Afghan time zone, inshallah! "Why so many?" Due to excess freedom, many countries, including India, Iran, New Zealand, and others, have introduced time zones that differ by 15, 30, and 45 minutes! In Pakistani Islamabad, it's 5 a.m.; in Indian New Delhi, it's 5:30; and in neighboring Kathmandu, it's 5:45. "Isn't it funny?"
But, in my opinion, Australia has set a record – no matter how much and what you drink, you won't figure it out, and that wasn't even the goal of the Designer. According to geography, this country has three time zones: in the Western zone (Perth), it's 8 a.m.; in the Central zone (Alice Springs), it's 9:30; and in the Eastern zone (Brisbane) – it's exactly 10. – Oh, it's as clear as day! – But it only seems that way: Sydney is also in the Eastern zone as Brisbane, but there it's already 11 a.m.! - Why? – Well, that's elementary; the annual switch to daylight saving time has already happened in Sydney, whereas the residents of Brisbane and the Queensland province do not recognize it. The brain refuses to perceive such minor details: if you fly from Adelaide to Brisbane in June (winter, of course), you set your clocks 30 minutes ahead, and in December (summer), you set them back by half an hour.
In the interest of fairness, it should be added that "in every madness, there is its system," and the established division into time zones in Australia was not arbitrary but the result of years of work by the legislative bodies of individual provinces. As early as 1899, the Central Australian states moved their clocks from 9 to 9:30 to reduce the advantage of stockbrokers in the Eastern states, where the stock exchange used to open a whole (!) hour earlier.
Clearly, the introduction of daylight saving time and standard time, involving moving the clock forward by an hour in spring and backward by an hour in autumn, exacerbated the situation and brought it to absurdity: each country adjusts the clocks on an arbitrary day, often determined by climatic peculiarities, religious calendars, or the perverse desire to "minimize damage to the population": "Move the clocks at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in March."
It never occurs to anyone, or any local authority, to coordinate the date of the time change with neighboring jurisdictions. However, there are already entire countries that have realized that the harm from daylight saving time far exceeds the (imaginary) benefit and have abandoned it, such as China and Russia. It may have improved things for them, but for international relations, it didn't bring anything positive – the complexity did not decrease, and the idea was compromised: if dictatorial regimes abolish something, then democracies will defend the idea of daylight-saving time to the last bullet.
China went even further and ultimately merged all its zones, which, based on its vastness, would have resulted in five, into one, and... Nothing bad happened, as I'll explain a little later.
If anyone has read up to this point, he/she/they've probably guessed that the author is a proponent of the forced elimination of this chaos and the introduction of Universal Time worldwide. The idea is not mine, and obviously, there are many opponents, fewer supporters (so far), and the remaining 99.99% of the Earth's inhabitants believe that Voltaire was absolutely right when he wrote in Candide, "All is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds." If these zones exist, it means it's for our good. If the free people of Hawaii and Arizona have canceled the transition to daylight saving time, it's their business and let programmers introduce a couple of conditional operators into the code.
Of course, programmers get paid for this, and they cope with the problem of time calculation, albeit imperfectly: my Android automatically switched to daylight saving time today, and I didn't miss my granddaughter's figure skating practice; although, I was slightly alarmed when I looked at my wristwatch in the morning. Writing such a program is probably easier than, say, developing autonomous vehicle control, but still not for beginners. Even when planning a simple work meeting for employees of a bank, whose units are located on five continents, many factors need to be considered: in which time zone each meeting participant is, local working hours, individual schedules, and who is in charge, holidays, vacations... As Cyril N. Parkinson, the author of the famous "Parkinson's Laws," wrote: "The growth of a system leads to complexity, and complexity leads to its demise." He meant the British Empire, but there is no reason to think that this principle will bypass the modern system of time zones. Employees at the Kiribati branch will undoubtedly try to connect to this meeting a day later or earlier, and they can only blame themselves for it.
Those interested in the history of time zones, the International Date Line, and daylight saving time can explore the internet and find a wealth of interesting information and justifications for why all this is necessary. For example, the logic is such: the workday at the factory starts at 8 a.m. (always – it's a law of nature!), and in winter, it can't start earlier because workers won't find their way in the dark, or they'll have to have breakfast by candlelight, which is expensive. But in summer, it gets light earlier, so daylight saving time should be introduced, shifting the clocks forward by an hour. This concept of daylight saving time, ideally leading to candle savings, is attributed to none other than Benjamin Franklin; perhaps that's why he was so interested in electricity. Note that in mid-latitudes (e.g., Boston, Milan), the length of daylight varies throughout the year from 7 to 18 hours, so you could theoretically adjust the clocks by an hour every month.
So, let's put it to a vote:
- Who is in favor of having the same time everywhere on Earth? In any location, at all times, in both winter and summer, whether in Kharkiv or Rio de Janeiro.
Someone might say, well, maybe we can do away with daylight saving time, but what about time zones? How can we do without them? I asked this question to many acquaintances, and almost always, often following a sarcastic laugh, the argument was: – Suppose Universal Time is the same as the current Greenwich Mean Time. Then, in America, especially in California, people would have to work at night!
Not at all! Suppose it's 7 a.m. in London, the Sun has just risen, and it's time to get up and go to work. It's also 7 a.m. in Boston, but sunrise is still five hours away – sleep peacefully. The Sun rises around 12 p.m.; you get up, have breakfast, take the subway, and go to the office – most establishments open at 1 p.m. And they finish work at 9 p.m. when it's getting dark, but in Los Angeles, it's midnight – the Sun from Boston reaches there in three hours. And this is the only thing you need to get used to: sunrise occurs at different times in different places. Well, it's like that now, depending on the season and latitude: beyond the Arctic Circle, there are days when the Sun doesn't appear at all, and nothing bad happens – polar bears sleep for a few months, and people work every day, by candlelight or electricity.
But the question "What time is it?" no longer requires tension and an additional counter-question: - Where? – Everywhere, it's Saturday, 5:01 a.m. now! – What about Africa? – Also, 5:01 there! - If you board a plane in New York and head to Moscow, a 10-hour flight, you'll arrive there at 3 p.m., and it will still be Saturday, not Sunday, not according to the local decree but according to Global Time. If a meeting is scheduled in Delhi at 3:00, it will be 3:00 for all participants on their calendars, not 3:15 like for Iranians or 2:45 like for Nepalese.
Here, it is necessary to reassure programmer-calendar enthusiasts, Y2K victims: no one will be out of work. Time is unified, but, as in prehistoric times, Americans are still at work while Germans are already drinking beer, and the phone's electronic secretary must take this into account and reconcile interests. Engage in programming, guys – all the past zonal temporal idiocy will remain with you! I remember when I worked with a German company; they conveniently scheduled meetings at 3 p.m. local so that it would be 9 a.m. in Boston. Then, relations with the American colleague cooled slightly, and the European comrades moved this daily meeting to their 9 a.m. I set my alarm for 3 a.m. and persisted until they switched from English to German to get rid of me efficiently.
Yes, for a while, it will be unusual and wild to live in a Universal Global Time. In some countries, you might have to send a child to daycare at 10 p.m., even though it's technically morning. But people adapt to everything, especially to the good, like when you switch from a manual transmission to an automatic one for the first time: it's strange for five minutes, and then you think, "My goodness, how convenient! Why did I struggle with a clutch for thirty years!" Just tell me, is it not strange to arrive into yesterday, work the night shift in a hospital when everyone else is asleep, or call July the winter month, as residents of the southern hemisphere do? But everyone gets used to it, even though they could have arranged things so that when moving from Europe to Australia, March changes to September, at least in a few provinces.
Regardless of what opponents of common sense say, no matter what arguments they present against it, the future belongs to a Universal Global Time. Why? Because it's convenient for the Chinese Communist Party and Davos globalists: a unified state, a single leadership, a unified banking system – why not have unified time? Especially when there will be only one jurisdiction. Are you convinced?
Well, if not, then just fear God, who created day and night, space and time, and even the theory of relativity, conveyed to the rest of us through Albert Einstein, and abandon these games with Time for good.
(c) Dimus, 2022 March
Translation ChatGPT 3.5, 2023 December
А в Петропавловске-Камчатском всегда полночь.
Пусть это будет моей самой большой проблемой в 2024. 🐸