Time Zone!

As I previously noted, I was recently working on a marketing project that required cooperation with several people within my company.

Now I'll say what the project was - it was a social media campaign related to a recent trade show. I was part of the team that was executing the campaign, which not only included mentions on my company's official social media channels, but also reshares of this content by others, including myself.

So because of my participation in the campaign, I was well aware that an official post would appear on Twitter at 10:00 am Eastern time, referencing an event that would take place at 11:25 am Eastern time.

At the time that this tweet would appear, I would not be in the Eastern time zone. I would be in the Pacific time zone. But I still wanted to retweet the item.

So a few minutes after 7 Pacific time, I had my mobile phone out, Twitter app open. I found the tweet in question and reshared it, along with a comment encouraging people to attend the event in fifteen minutes.

A couple of minutes later, my phone buzzed with an email on my corporate email account. It was from an employee in the Eastern time zone, who gently conveyed the following message to me:

Good morning, John. Heads up re: your recent tweet: – it’s 10:14 in the East, not 11:14.

So I deleted the tweet and replaced it with a corrected one.

The affair irked me because I usually pride myself at my mastery of time zone differences - not only between the opposite ends of my own country, but between my workplace and the parent company headquarters in France. Granted there are a few weeks in spring and fall when that California-to-France calculation fails, but for the most part I can keep my 9-hour time difference straight, and my 3-hour time difference. Obviously I failed in that instance.

But that isn't the important part of this post. The important part is that I get to steal thunder from one of my other blogs and post the video of this song.