I went to work at 8a.m. this morning, because I have a conference call with the Indian design center. The different in time zone make communication between the two sites really inconvenient. I have two options when to have the meeting, 8a.m. in the morning or 8p.m. in the evening. None of them fits my usual schedule. I pick the early morning from the lesser of two evils.

I can understand why different places have different the time zone, the world is not flat after all. However I am kinda surprise to find out India is 13 hours and 30 minutes ahead of Vancouver. Pacific stand time is GMT-8 and the India time is GMT+5.5. Where the extra 0.5 hours come from? It won’t make much different using a round number for time zone, since the time zone is not divided evenly anyways. Some part of China is right above India and the time zone is GMT+8. It would not save any power for lights by shifting a mere 0.5 hours. Why can’t the Indians use a nice round number relative to the Greenwich Mean Time?  Hold on a sec, before saying Indians are silly to have an half hour time zone. We the Canadians are equally stupid, Newfoundland has GMT-3.5.

I made some interesting observation from the time zone chart. Time zone GMT-11 does not exists anywhere! There is no place on earth has their clock set to 11 hours slower than the Greenwich Mean Time. We have Tonga Island has GMT+13 thought. It is another mystery why would they use GMT+13 instead of GMT-11. When I first know Indian have a 30 minutes time zone, I was joking why don’t they make it a 15 minutes time zone to have it more accurately. Actually there exists a place super stupid enough to use 15 minutes time zone. The Chatham Islands has GMT+12:45.

Maybe the UN should fix the time zone chart, get rid of all the 0dd ball time zone to make things less confusing.