After a recent thread on Twitter–not one, thankfully, I was involved in–I thought it might be fun to air out a theory of mine. specificly that of one timezone. I don’t see why, beyond the method of keeping track of where the sun’s at at any particular moment. It’s noon, which means you look straight up and you’ll pretty well go blind. It’s 9:00 in the middle of July, so if you hurry to your window you’ll be able to see it setting. While all the while someone in England’s watching it come up.
With businesses going global anyway, and just about everything happening across national and continental borders, it only makes sense to consider the elimination of timezones. Businesses in Canada and the US send their call center jobs to India. Britain sells things to businesses in Mexico. China has arangements to ship things back and forth between several countries–including Canada and the US. And all of those would run much faster, and be a whole lot more eficient, if 9:00 in New York equated to 9:00 in London. Sure, it means some places would be lacking in daylight, but well, we already have that already–see: Alaska.
If we’re gonna make everything global anyway, the world should at least try to keep itself on the same schedule. If it’s midnight in New York, folks won’t be calling their sister/cousin/friend/whatever in California because they might not be ready to call it a night yet. Conversely, I won’t get a call from the east coast at 5:00 in the morning from a family member who happens to be staring at a clock that says 9:00 AM instead, and thusly not be required to later plan to beat them to a fine paste for the unwelcome wake-up. And life would go on just as usual–except maybe not as brightly in some parts of the world. But folks are already dealing with that–see Alaska, as mentioned above. If they can handle it for as long as they do, so can we stronger folks.
There’s really no reason I can think of to keep timezones around, except to keep track of when the sun’s up and where. We move to one timezone, and anyone with any reason to keep contact with folks on a global basis is happy. Also, converting 3:00 PST to anything not remotely asociated with my timezone or GMT is a real pain in the ass. Let’s kill that, like, now.
In short, timezones are evil. If we didn’t have to worry about that, we could concentrate on things that could actually be made much better by removing them. Also: daylight savings? Gone. That can’t hurt anyone. Well, okay, so it maybe wouldn’t hurt me. Then again, it’s my blog–naturally all my ehtories will be me-centric. And sometimes, they even possess an almost normal sense of logic.