Calendars Don’t Work

I am totally frustrated with dumbness of calendars. On all levels.

First of all, why do we use a base 12 hour system? 60 seconds in a minute, and 24 hours a day? Can we go decimal, please? I thought the beat time was a good idea, especially as it solved the time zone issue — no time zones in beat time, just a thousnad ‘beats’ per day — but it will never catch on.

So I am resigned to 24 hours, 7 days a week (don’t get me started), and time zones.

But in that case, shouldn’t our calendar tools work? They just don’t, at least not if you travel.

For example, I can turn on the time zone features of iCal, which allows me to attribute an appointment with a time relative to a time zone. But then everything falls apart if you use it. I plan to fly from Dulles to Oakland, leaving at 6.05 am, landing at 10.30am. The reservation info is provided that way, but the appointment only allows a single time zone for the appointment. So I could, I suppose, mentally transpose the 10.30am landing time to be 1.30pm ET, but then the display screws up. And when I set up appointments in CA when I am in VA, I would have to similarly transpose everything, even though I actually plan to be in CA for the meetings. This means you see a meeting at 1pm (ET) when it really will be taking place at 10am (PT) when you get there. Very confusing.

The answer? Apple and other calendar makers need to provide finer grained control for appointments: time zones for start and finish, and a display time zone control. While I am in VA, I may want to display all events ‘localized’ — relative to the time zone I am currently in — or ‘globalized’ where everything is displayed in its own time zone.

Things get even worse when I try to change time zones on my Mac. I land in CA, set the time zone to PT, and all the times on my calendar, which I have not transposed, move three hours. Likewise my cell phone, if I use the automatic time zone features.

So, I have reverted to manual control of all my time-based devices. I turn off time-zone support in iCal, and adjust time and date manually on my Mac and my cell phone (at least when traveling out of ET). Because calendars don’t work. At least not for travelers.