To some people, time zones are just a fancy way of sounding important, episode 2

A few summers ago, there was an announcement about downtime for a commonly-used service.

Servers will be taken offline from 9am to 11am PST.

I suspected that this was another case of people thinking that standard time is just a formal way of saying local time.

I use that service a lot, and if it wasn’t going to be available in the morning, I needed to plan around it. The message also said, “For support use our chatbot.” So I went to the chatbot to confirm the time zone for the maintenance window.

The chatbot replied, “Sorry, I cannot help with outages or maintenance windows.” So chatbot doesn’t do the very thing they told us to use it for.

The announcement also said, “For more information, see this link.” So I went to the link.

The link is 404.

Now 0 for 2, I contacted the team directly. “Um, so that means 10am to noon Redmond local time (PDT)?”

Nope, they really meant 9am to 11am Redmond local time. They didn’t read the maintenance window times in their own announcement. People at remote offices will do the wrong time zone conversion.

I pointed out to them that their chatbot is unable to help with the very thing they directed people to use it for. And that their support link is broken. They said they’ll look into it.¹

The team sent out a follow-up announcement later that day clarifying that the downtime is 9am to 11am Redmond local time (PDT), not PST.

The next day, I received announcement that another popular service was going to be unavailable from 9am to 11am PST. I asked that second team to clarify whether the downtime really was 10am to noon Redmond local time, or whether they intended PDT rather than PST.

The second team wrote back and apologized for the error. Their service is dependent upon the first service, so they copied the downtime window from the first team’s announcement and pasted it into theirs. They must have missed the correction, so they copied the wrong information.

Two days later, I was part of an online group exercise, and the facilitator said that we would take a break and resume at 3:30 Pacific Standard Time. I commented in the group chat for the benefit of remote attendees that they probably meant Pacific Daylight Time, since that’s the current time zone in Redmond.

Time zones: They’re not just for sounding formal. They actually mean something. If you mean Redmond local time, then just say Redmond local time.

Most of the United States changes from Standard time to Daylight time this weekend.

¹ Narrator: “They didn’t look into it.”

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