So, one day at work, at like 11:43am, I turned to my coworker and, well, … we both sighed heavily. Somehow the topic of alcohol came up and, of course, the infamous words – well, it is 5 o’clock somewhere – were spoken. After a moment, I had a thought. Yes, that does happen from time to time. Usually I keep these random thoughts to myself or write blog posts about them. On that day, I decided to say –
“But is it really 5 o’clock somewhere? How many time zone can there actually be?”
Fortunately for the pharmacy staff – note: sarcasm – another coworker decided to answer the question AND join the conversation without permission. Luckily, his answer was a simple “24 “- note: nothing with this person is ever simple. Then the attention had to shift back to filling prescriptions and that was that.
Until … I decided to create this post. Besides, I love the song link I included, so I had to find a way to incorporate it. Right?
Currently there are 24 official time zones in the world. There are 16 others too but they are not usually taken into account in official international matters. Official time zones are divided into units of one hour each but the unofficial time zones may have 15 min, 30 min or 45 min as their base unit. Ideally speaking, there should be 24 time zones in the world but this is not the world of our dreams and there are political factors at work too! For example, China and India don’t have any time zones but if speaking scientifically, China passes through five time zones and India through two, but the ruling politicians who don’t want to divide their country into time zones in order to protect its integrity! The result is: one has to adjust his/her watch by 3.5 hours when one crosses the border from China to Afghanistan.
On the other hand, there are eleven time zones in both France and Russia and the government of Russia is trying to bring the number down. In Iran, the government prefers to divides the time zones into 30 minute units
Furthermore,
Until 1972 all time zones were specified as an offset from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which was the mean solar time at the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. Since 1972 all official time services have broadcast radio time signals synchronized to UTC, a form of atomic time that includes leap seconds to keep it within 0.9 seconds of this former GMT, now called UT1. Many countries now legally define their standard time relative to UTC, although some still legally refer to GMT, including the United Kingdom itself. UTC, also called Zulu time, is used everywhere on Earth by astronomers and others who need to state the time of an event unambiguously.
This whole ‘leap second’ thing is under constant attack. Why wouldn’t it be, though? It sounds really stupid. Personally, I think these time zone analyst people need to just fuck 5 o’clock and have a drink.
But that’s just me.
