America Should Only Have One Time Zone

Central Standard Time or bust.

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I’m currently visiting the lovely city of Los Angeles. Amid the sun and the lovely fruit trees in people’s front yards, I’m gripped with a frequent annoyance as I try to interact with anyone on the East Coast, where I live. My days have gone something like this: I wake up around 9 a.m. (PST) and have a text from my cat sitter, bizarrely timestamped 5:52 a.m. Why is she seeing my cats so early, I wonder. It takes me a beat: Ah, that’s 5:52 a.m. PST, which is 8:52 a.m. EST, a perfectly normal time to drop in and dump out some wet cat food slop before the day picks up. Today, the appointed day for me to have the pleasure of blogging about a personal grievance for Discourse Blog, I wake up even earlier (8 a.m. PST) to check in with my editor at 11 a.m. EST. I work back from there: I’m recording a podcast at 1:30 p.m. PST, which is 4:30 p.m. EST, so I’ll need to file my blog before I record, otherwise it’ll be too late (only on the East Coast, mind you).

This is madness. And I have a solution. The United States should only have one time zone, and it should be Central Standard Time.

But Katherine, I can almost hear you saying, this is meeting madness with more lunacy. No. Very smart people agree with me.