Why I'm Always A Day Ahead Of You, And How Sometimes That Makes Life Strange

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Because of my location in New Zealand at the bottom of the world, we are generally a day ahead of the rest of the northern hemisphere's time zone. That's pretty much every country except Australia.

As the first country in the world to see the sun, it is sometimes challenging - especially when I'm trying to work out when to ring someone in the United States. That's when I google "time in California" to figure it out.

Swatch attempted to reinvent time with Swatch Beats. Swatch Group

Here's some of the interesting ways the time difference challenges you and me on the opposite ends of the earth:

  • Like the cobbler's elves in the fairytale, I'm always working in your night time. So when you wake up, amazingly there's a handful of new blog posts waiting here. Truth is, I've been happily working through my day, not your night.

  • It makes my customer answers a little erratic. I check my email hourly, 7 days a week, to answer your queries. You'll get a quick reply if you're writing at your night time, but when you want my reply in your daytime, the fact is I'm asleep (dead asleep actually... I sleep very soundly at night!). All I can say is thank you for your patience.

  • The Lotto Life blog posts are confusing for me to write sometimes. So on Friday night when I feel like telling everyone to have a great weekend, I have to remember that for most of the world it's actually Thursday.

  • Same problem with LottoPredict. I have to finish research and publish results on our Monday so the world can get started on your Sunday for the week coming up.

So you see it's mainly a time difference issue. The reality is that everything happens in the world at the same time - just that it's recorded differently in various time zones.

Swiss watchmaker Swatch proposed a new way of coping with pesky time zones by having an internet universal time called Beat.

It's not used much as far as I can tell. It's hard to change the time, but this cartoon attempts to make it a little easier to understand: