Does anybody know what time it is.....does anybody really care

Don Baer

Moderator
Staff member
The Chicago tune comes to mind. So the VA has an outside service for it's Compensation & Pension exams which I am in the process of going though right now and I get a phone call to schedule an appointment. The appointment for tomorrow the 30th @ 2:30 . I go to their web site to get the address and notice it says 2:30 (MT). I live in Arizona and right now we are on daylight savings time and wont be on mountain time until the end of October when you guys all change time. So I call them up and get an clarification and get a nice young lady on the phone. I explain my problem. She asks me all of the information so she can pull up my records and say, "I see you scheduled for 2:30" I explain to her that the letters MT after tell me that would be mountains time which if that is correct would be 1:30 Arizona time. She sounds confused and finally explains that she is on central time and is not very good with time zones. So I kindly ask her who I can speak to to get a clarification and she sound confused. Finally she confesses that I will need to speak to my case worker and she wont be in until 10. To which I ask 10 AM or PM and is it 10 o'clock in what time zone. Again she stumbles a little and finally I look at the time on my computer and tell her look it's 7:30 in Arizona does she mean 10 AM central which would be 8 AM my time and she says yes please call back then...
 
We change on November 6th, but we are in the process that next year, hopefully, we will go on daylight savings time year round! All this changing and multiple zones sure can get confusing.
 
We can only know time with a degree of uncertainty.


This is perhaps better explained by the old George Carlin skit on "what is time" and in particular "when is now, cause it's not yet and it wasn't then" bit. And if you don't think I didn't have to look through several versions to find one clean enough I shouldn't have to take the time to explain why.

 
I never fail to be dismayed at the current lack of understanding of many things we all took for common knowledge when I was 30-something. Many adults of today haven't the faintest idea how gravity works, can barely pronounce the word inertia, and the idea that our solar system is a speck in our galaxy, which is a speck in a thing called the universe, makes blood shoot out of their eyes. Local, state, and national governing structures also elude them. I even got a blank stare when asking directions and tried to clarify if the guy I was talking to meant the state highway or the interstate . . . "the what???". Sheesh.
 
At my last job I was responsible for coordinating teleconference meetings with IHS (Indian Health Service) facilities from all over the country. I might have developers in Tennesee talking to IHS sites in Alaska. I was very good at figuring out what time zones everyone was in, but the Arizona sites on the Navajo Nation were always a challenge. The Navajos don't observe Daylight Saving Time, so even if they're in AZ, they might not be on Arizona time.
 
  • Hawaii and Arizona (except for Navajo Nation ) do not observe Daylight Saving Time . Aside from these states, the territories of American Samoa , Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands , Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands do not also practice clock changing.
the Navaho Nation is on Mountain time even in Arizona but I don't know if they change when the rest of the states in the mountain time zone change.... now I'm getting confused.
 
...the Navaho Nation is on Mountain time even in Arizona but I don't know if they change when the rest of the states in the mountain time zone change.... now I'm getting confused.
The Navajos change like the rest of the country, and they're in the same time zone as I am in NM. Where things got tricky was knowing if an IHS clinic was actually on the reservation, or if it was in a city like Phoenix or Tucson. And if they were in a city, did that clinic follow Navajo time or AZ time? I also had some developers in AZ, so that just added to the confusion.

I know there have been efforts to have NM just stay on DST year-round. I'd be all for that.
 
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