Category: travelling

The craziest thing just happened. I went to Morocco and the weekend I traveled, the Moroccan government decided to cancel daylight savings. It was apparently at short notice. Consequently, my phone was outa whack with the local time and I had to switch off the auto timezone and fix it manually…y’know, like in the old days.

Then my watch, where I can set the cities and it auto updates, was also outa whack and I had to do the same. I didn’t bother changing the time on my laptop because I don’t rely on that clock too much – it takes more than the absolute minimum amount of effort to update, and when I am traversing many timezones in a short time its just a hassle.

Then a week goes by and I travel to Athens. My watch makes no sense, cause I turned the auto daylight savings off whenI  was in Morocco and I can’t work out out why it is showing (what I thought) is the wrong time in Athens. I’m only here for a day and a half, I don’t care. So my laptop and my watch times can’t be trusted, no worries….I’ll go by my phone. I had turned it to auto but it seemed wrong…sometimes when you land the phone networks take a while to update, so I just turned it back to manual and updated it to what I thought the time was. But I was, for some crazy reason, an hour out. I don’t know how it happened… maybe it was cause I landed at 1am (or was it midnight?) or something. I don’t know…but I thought it was right.

So… no problems … I have a few meetings online from the hotel…no worries, when you travel a lot it doesn’t actually matter what timezone your calendar is set to – you just check the red line for the time now, and see when in the near future the meeting will be. No problems..I can work fine that way. Time being a relative thing and all when on the move, it’s not so much what time is it now but how much time there is to X (boarding…the hotel…sleep…a meeting) that is important.

Until… I sorta make a big deal, jokingly, about meeting later that day with the Coko Athens team… like, I’ve traveled 17000 km and can make it to a cafe on time, but Yannis says he will be 20 minutes late going across town…or something like that…so I kinda give him a bit of a ribbing and make a big deal out of it…

I turn up to the cafe and everyone is there…I thought I was 10 mins late so I apologize… we have our meeting and all is good. The next day I have another meeting with them and they are all there on time (or so I thought) and we go through some more stuff, have some coffee…etc…

Then its time to go to the airport. I order a taxi and in the taxi see a clock on the dash… wait a minute…. it’s an hour later than what my phone says…I ping Yannis and ask him if I was 10 mins late for that first meeting…or if I was an hour late (horror!) … an hour late he says…both days….

Oh my… can’t believe it. I hate being late and I turned up late twice. BY an hour! Worse still, the very kind Greek team didn’t even mention it though I had hassled them about getting there on time… I still can’t quite believe this happened….amazing…