I was reading Mark Pritchard’s post, Saving Daylight, on Too Beautiful about having to get up ungodly early for a phone meeting on the West Coast with folks on the East Coast who were unaware that it was so early in the morning that stars were still visible.

I used to telecommute from California for an office in Boston, and I used to get phone calls at approximately 4:15 a.m. PST, which is the time one of my supervisors arrived at work in EST. He was checking on me. Now the first couple of times, I answered the phone, because I thought that it might be an emergency. But no, oh no, the content of the call was about some writing about fractions that I did that was unacceptable.

And so the phones moved from the bedroom, from the kitchen, and from the living room to the office. So now there are three phones in approximately 100 square feet in my office. Just in case.

My supervisors in Boston weren’t the only ones with a sense of authority in their own time zone. On a regular basis, I still get work calls at really bizarre times, such as 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning to discuss chapter structure.

It seems the UU Carnival needs posts on authority, so I will mention this: Eastern Standard Time is standard only to those on the East Coast of the United States. It’s not standard for the country, nor the world, but for some reason people think it is.