John Cowan wrote: >I think that's over the top. Bureaucratically it is just too annoying >if the large majority of people have a work shift that overlaps legal >midnight.
Same for years too: the Roman calendar was naturally arranged so that the annual period of growing and harvesting things was entirely encompassed by the calendar year. Imagine how annoying it would be if the summer overlapped the legal year end. Oh, wait: southern hemisphere. Somehow they cope without a season zone offset six months from the northern hemisphere. Seriously, I think a work shift crossing days is a trivial matter. Everyone will cope, just as they already cope with activities that span midnight. Your diary page will be headed "2007-01-02/03" instead of "2007-01-02". I don't see things getting much more difficult than that. I have an idea what might precipitate the switch to UT, too. Part of the acceptability of current timezones comes from the fact that geographically nearby regions have fairly similar legal times, differing by only an hour or two. The exception is in the Pacific, where a few islands away the timezone differs by a whole day. People arrive a day late to catch planes; there's a measurable economic cost to this difference. I think Pacific airlines will be the first to give up on timezones, and adopt UTC, so that the schedules are less confusing. Then people in the region will gradually accept `airline time' for everyday purposes, and then it'll start to become official. New Zealand was the first country to officially adopt a standard timezone nationally (GMT+11:30, in 1868). Perhaps they'll also be the first to switch to national use of UTC. (Not counting Morocco, for which UT is a geographically natural timezone.) Welcome to Wellington, where office hours are 21:30 to 05:30. -zefram