> * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?
The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones don't help or hurt that. It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours. Maybe they could say "Tuesday around 1400" and we would both know when that was without considering the offset.
> If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for another.
You do make a lot of things simpler by not having to figure out offsets. Sometimes you still will, but it will be less often.
> It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours
In 99% of cases of my communications it's perfectly clear because it's the same for both of us. The GP said that without a local timezone Tuesday Morning would be ambiguous even in a local context.
In the military, there is Zulu (+0 UTC/GMT) and Juliet time ("my" time). Every report with times should always indicate the timezone (whether Z or J or otherwise), e.g. in NYC 2pm would be 1400Y. Any recent/current military folks want to comment?
Is there a different single letter per time zone band? That’s almost elegant if so (as long as you ignore the many places with idiosyncratic time zones).
But seriously, in DST world, the numerical offsets (-6, ...) are confusing enough, adding yet another "simpler" notation would only increase confusion.
I did say almost elegant...! I just hadn't noticed before that the 26 Roman letters are just enough for 24 hour-wide timezones, which seems like a nice coincidence, so I wondered if anyone had tried it. There are way more than 24 different zones in practice, of course.
Unfortunately, there's too many timezones for just A-Z, but nautical time does make an attempt.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets for the funny markings they decided to use when they ran out of letters.
As someone frequently half a world off from those I'm scheduling a call with, it helps to adapt a format that explicitly states [calendar date] [24hr time] my time / [calendar date] [24hr time] your time.
More often than not, one's morning or afternoon is late in the evening or in the middle of the night for the other person. So morning is almost unambiguously referring to the westernmost person and afternoon to the easternmost.
Instead if the working day begins at 23:00 (as would be the case for Pacific time) for me and 8:00 for you, but the meeting is already at 1:00/10:00, it is unclear if you mean "at 1:00 of Wednesday, which is on the working day that started Tuesday at 23:00" or "at 1:00 of Tuesday, on the working day that started Monday at 23:00".
The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones don't help or hurt that. It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours. Maybe they could say "Tuesday around 1400" and we would both know when that was without considering the offset.
> If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for another.
You do make a lot of things simpler by not having to figure out offsets. Sometimes you still will, but it will be less often.