Living on a ship that cruises through time zones, ticking them off as we go, has many odd consequences.
This week we put the clocks forward on Thursday, and puts the clocks forward again on Friday. Then on Tuesday we go back an hour and again on Wednesday.
Now the effects of this chaos are so far reaching I cannot even tell you what they are. (But it starts with the IT Officer getting up at 6 am to change the mainframe time. It sucks to have an hour forward, and then have to get up even an hour more forward to change the mainframe clock.)
Luckily the ship builders were BRILLIANT! All the wall clocks on board are controlled on the bridge; I think this is genius.
Another affect of this is, unlike daylight savings time, on any given day, the time difference between me and my loved ones various. Today it is 12 hours to the west coast. On Friday it will be ten hours.
That is just too damned confusing.
So I have this dual clock, a clock with two dials that can be individually set. The other day, I set one clock on Pacific Time, 1:40 and one on Eastern Time, 4:40.
The next day, pleased with myself, I checked my dual clock. According to my clock, it was 11:53 west coast and 4:15 eastern coast.
So I am back to checking the wall for our current gst plus value and calculating.
The fact that we change time zone so frequently, makes it hard to keep track of the time land based offices we interact with, such as the LA Corporate Office, Florida Spa Office, etc. (When you have to call your boss in LA for something urgent, it is important to consider whether it is 3 am.) To compensate, there are clocks all over the ship set to random hours, but the correct minute past the hour. This way there is no need to first figure out what time zone we are in before figuring out what time it is somewhere else, where somewhere else is a land based office a the nearest person works with most.
Our office has an LA clock that is always set to LA time. (It should say, Boss Time, cause that is all we care about.) It took me a few time changes before I was comfortable not changing the time on that clock when changing other clocks.
We also use the phrase old time/new time a lot. He called at 11 new time, 10 o’clock old time last night. This is partially because the time does not change at 2 am. The time changes at some nebulous localized convenient over night time. In the bars, the time change is after 3 am. The computer systems change time at 5 am. The hotel and phone accounting systems change around 7 am. I think the bridge watch changes at 4 am. (But now I am curious and will find out.) Luggage handlers change time at 8pm the night before. And the Ving servers never change time, they stay in GMT, always.
To make sure no one forgets the time change, the crew doors have signs. They are turned to “time change” on the nights with time changes, to remind us to change our clocks, and be on time.
It is also funny when I wear a watch, which I only do when I get off the ship. I put on my watch the other day and wandered around the city. I checked the time, knowing I would have to get back, and the time was clearly wrong. (It turned out to be wrong by two hours.) I needed to know what time it was but could not find the time. I had to remember what city I had last worn the watch, what time zone the city was in, what time zone I was in at that time and adjust my watch.
In the end, you spend a lot of time, on time.
Submitted at
21:35 GMT +3.00 old time or
20:35 GMT +2.00 new time
11:35 GMT -8.00 LA time
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