Time Travel

I am not an idiot, but maybe I am…

Sometimes I have a hard time keeping my time zones straight. The issue is that I work in the Central timezone, my boss and most of my team work in the Mountain timezone except for one that works in the Pacific time zone and for the kicker….almost all of the IT team works in the Eastern time zone. For the most part I can keep this straight, especially with the help of my Outlook calendar that automatically changes meeting times to correlate with my Central timezone. However, when I travel my brain gets scrambled.

I don’t know why my brain just cannot adjust to re-calculating the other time zones from a new location comparative to where I am usually located. While in Boston last week I wanted to make sure that I called my daughter before she went to school and I kept telling myself that I was an hour ahead. After a restless night of sleep I called at 6:30 am EDT thinking it was 7:30am at home…well thankfully my call did not wake anyone up because it was 5:30 am CDT. Yup, that would have been not so pleasant for my family.

Once I did talk to Taylor (our almost 9-year-old), she informed me of specific ‘Boston’ times I was allowed to call so I wouldn’t wake them up or miss them at night. Thank goodness she is a smart little thing who can lead a sleep deprived mother through time zone differences.