What Time(zone) Is It?

Through my years working on cruise ships, I have acquired obscure adept ability to tell you what time it is in other time zones. This comes with years of practice, changing time zones, one hour at a time.

When you live on a cruise ship, you very rarely spend a week in one time zone. You often travel east to west or west to east switching time zones. To people not accustomed to this practice, you might wonder, how do you coordinate over 1000 people changing their watches. For the crew, we get these silly, but very effective, little reminders on our doors the day before a time change.

The reason why this guy is dancing and on a green card is because tonight is an hour back. An hour back means an hour more to sleep in, and everyone likes that. (Though to be honest, it tends to mean a great night out at the bar so you stay up two hours later, negating all benefits. But let’s just pretend you actually get an hour more of sleep.)

Today, I am in Spain. I was asked what time it is in LA. I look at my watch, see it is 3pm locally, and can tell you in an instant it is 6am in LA. I do this calculation at least once a day, in whatever time zone I am in.  I also often do the offset between the ship I am on and the other ship. The calculation today is easy as we are GMT +2 and the other ship is GMT +3.

At this point, I have been in every time zone of the world, including the weird 0.5 hour times zones like Newfoundland, Canada, parts of India and parts of Australia. I know ridiculous obscurities like which time zones choose to adjust for daylight savings and that Israel changes does spring forward on Fridays not Sundays. All of this is really more than any one person should know.

And this is just standard for my position and my experience.

Anyway, as I walked through my cabin door, happy to see the happy dancing alarm clock on a green background, it occurred to me how mystifying it would be to most people that a dancing alarm clock on green paper could bring a smile to my face so I thought I would explain.

Happy Hour Back.

Stupid: Hours forward, an hour less of sleep.

Cool: Hours back, also generally an hour less of sleep, but theoretically, an hour more of sleep.