Time ZonesIn about 4-6 generations, I am positive that elementary students will read about the century we live in and they will laugh. What they will be laughing at is a simple fact, we are living in the computer age where the boundaries of business are ever expanding and we use perhaps one of the most confusing methods for reporting the simplest unit of measure…and that measure is TIME.

Take a second and just browse over to this link, it will open in a new window so you don’t lose where you are here.

This link shows you some cities across the globe and what “time” it is there. If I asked you “what time it was” you’d instantly rattle an answer off, but if I asked you “what time it was in Prague?” you’d have to stop and think, and most of us would not know without consulting some resource…my question is why?


Why shouldn’t we all be using the same single reference when we are referring to a specific instance upon the same continuum which we all live?

Think about it for a second. If you draw a line on a piece of paper to represent a timeline, any single point upon that timeline is just that, a single point, so why do we label it so differently depending upon where we are on the map? Here in the states something that happens on the east coast at 5PM is referenced as happening at 2PM on the west coast, yet they refer to the same point on the timeline.

If I asked you what temperature it was, you wouldn’t stop and ask me, “well, depends upon my location.” This is no different with a single point in time.

Think of the number of meetings, delivery appointments, reservations, etc. that you have experienced where the time zone issue has come into play. Throw daylight savings time into the mix and it is a real mess, nobody knows what time it is anywhere except where they currently are. It’d be staggering to account for the billions of dollars wasted due to “time zone” issues and the confusion it creates yearly.

During my day job I often program computers. Trying to program a computer to account for the time zone mess in the trucking industry is complex and confusing, particularly when the rules of time change, such as this year with the daylights savings time change that went into effect with much of the country.

The solution to this problem is actually very simple, we already have it. It was developed over 300 years ago. It originated in 1675 as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and since 1972 has been revised to be UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

The time zones we live in today are actually an offset of GMT / UTC. The problem is we report time based on our locale, not based on GMT. If you care to be enlightened, you can read more about the time zones over at the wiki page.

All I know is my life was somewhat easy being a resident of Indiana, my clock never changed until last year, someone thought daylight savings time would be a good idea for parts of our state. So twice a year now I play with my clocks adjusting the times, all the while laughing.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how we are saving “daylight” when the astronomical phases of our planet remain fixed and the sun shines on our side of the globe no differently than it did before I moved my clocks around?

Someday, all this will change and the world will adopt the universal time, I have no doubt about this. It’ll take a generation or two to flush out the change, but it at some point has to happen.

Some of you are probably thinking “So you are proposing that when we say it is 13:00 (1PM) it will be night time where I’m at?” Absolutely, that it is like me asking you “So when it is 20 degrees Fahrenheit it will be cold where I’m at?”

I could go on, but to close, I’m a nerd and I love the show Star Trek. You hear them refer to everything relating it to the “star date” as for when it happened. This in the future will be UTC. It is too bad that none of us will be around to witness a world where we can refer to time with such simplicity and certainty, particularly in the transportation industry!