Now for my crazy rant on timezones and time as we know it today.

a long time ago (over a century ago) it used to take for ever to travel and telling time was not important, so each village looked at the sky and set their time. in the 1800's with the train distances got smaller and people traveled more and so the need to standardize time came to be with time zones. They worked well and even though people were scared at the time (what do you mean 12:00 will be 15 minutes earlier , and so will 8:00 when I start my day) but let's face it, none of us think much about it any more. Now my problem is not with the past TZ were a great idea for their time. My problem is with today, technology has brought us closer we can travel much farther much faster ( going around the world in 80 days is a slow luxury trip and not a race any more)and even worst through telecom means communicating across the world can be done instantaneously. My opinion is the world has become too small for 24 time zones and it is time we move to one. I guess part of this attitude comes from my old job. I used to have to communicate with people around the world on a daily basis and so did many others. The thing is sometimes it gets extremely complicated Brazil and Montreal have 1,2 or 3 hours difference depending on the time of year.

Now I know many of you will say "but what do you expect, do you want everyone to work 9-5 Montreal time?" No, but let's face it different parts of the world don't work at the same relative time as others to begin with, the people in our plants in northern Quebec started and ended their day 1/2 he earlier, the guy in Australia was starting his day at 6:00 AM , guys in France were typically there until well past 6:00 PM, guys in the UK worked at the same time we did..... so you don't only need to know what time these people work at (to make meetings convenient) but you also need to take into consideration the time zones and that different parts of the world changed their clocks in different ways at different times of the year (is UK 5h or 6h different today - you guys change it one week before us) or even worst, with the 12h-13.5h-14h depending what part of Australia you are calling you also need to make sure you have the right day, a Tuesday evening meeting here is a Wed morning meeting there