I’m from Germany and the concept of time zones is very foreign to me since we only have one time zone across the country.
As America has multiple time zones I was wondering which time zone is most commonly used to describe a time nationwide. For example if there is a TV show airing at a specific time or someone wants to describe an event happening in a different State.
I often hear people mentioning the Eastern Time (ET) and Pacific Time (PT). Eastern Time understandably applies to the east Coast including New York City. And as far as I understand Pacific Time actually is the Western time including Los Angeles, which also makes me wonder why it’s not called “Western Time (WT)”.
So I wonder which time is the one people most commonly use across the States.
And how do people keep track of that time zone if they’re not living there? Do most people have multiple clocks on their phone or do they Google the time each time or do they calculate when that time is relative to their time in their head?
There are 4 timezones in the mainland of the USA: eastern, central, mountain, and pacific. For the most part, it doesn’t make too much difference. There’s no reason for someone on the east coast to need to know what time it is on the west coast anymore than you need to keep track of what time it is in Ireland. Sometimes, you’ll call a friend who lives on the opposite coast, and you might have to think for a couple seconds to make sure you aren’t calling super late at night or early in the morning, but you don’t need to be exactly right about the time for that.
The borders of time zones tend to follow state lines, with some exceptions, so if you live near one, and you want to go to a store or something, you’ll probably be used to having to adjust.
For things like big businesses, where you are having meetings with people across the country, any calendar invite you send includes the time zone, so it will automatically get adjusted for.
What makes it a little weird is that some places have daylight savings time, while others don’t, so you can have different time even if you are in the same zone. Arizona, for example, is in the mountain time zone and doesnt use daylight savings like their neighbors do, but the Navajo Nation (whose reservation is mostly in arizona) does use daylight savings. The Hopi Nation (who are completely surrounded by the navajo) don’t use daylight savings. Basically, you could drive for an hour and change time 4 times.
TL;DR, it doesn’t really matter most of the time, and when it does, it’s not hard to figure out.
When we lived in Indiana they didn’t do dst. Half the year our evening news came on at 10 and half the year it came on at 11.