I Was Reading My Own Calendar in Someone Else's Timezone

By Junaid Ahmed

---

When someone books a recording with you, they pick their timezone. That's right, they should. They're choosing a slot that works for them, and we store what they chose.

Then I open my booking list and see "Thu, Aug 6, 3:00 PM."

That 3:00 was their 3:00.

---

Nothing told me

Here's the part that bothers me most, looking back.

The list didn't say "3:00 PM JST." It said "3:00 PM." A bare time, sitting in my own app, on my own bookings page.

There is no way to look at that and know it's wrong. It doesn't look like a bug. It looks like three in the afternoon.

I'd been mentally correcting for it without ever quite noticing I was, you learn that the number is a little off, and you check the guest's location, and you move on. That's the kind of thing you stop seeing.

---

The one that could have cost me a recording

The display was bad. The reschedule screen was worse.

When you reschedule, the form fills in the current date and time so you can nudge it. That prefill was pulling the date from one clock and the time from a different one. Then when you saved, it read your entry against a third.

Three clocks, one form.

For most bookings it looked fine, which is exactly why it survived. But an 8pm booking on the east coast is already tomorrow in UTC terms, so the form would helpfully fill in the next day's date, next to a time that looked completely correct.

Change nothing, hit save, and you've moved the recording a day.

I don't know that this ever happened to anyone. I know it could have.

---

What it does now

Every booking time in the app is in your timezone. Your list, the detail view, the cancel screen, the reschedule form.

And every one of them says which timezone, right there next to the time. EDT. PST. Whatever you're in. No bare numbers.

The guest's timezone didn't disappear, it's still on the booking detail, now clearly labelled Guest timezone, because it's genuinely useful to know your guest is in Tokyo. It just isn't the clock your own schedule gets drawn on anymore.

One thing you may notice on first load: if your guests book from other timezones, some of your times will look different than they did last week. That's the fix, not a new bug. Those times were wrong before.

---

Small detail I'll admit I got wrong at first: I was going to fall back to the guest's timezone when we didn't know yours yet. Which would have quietly reintroduced the whole problem for anyone who'd never been into their notification settings.

The app is running in your browser. It can just ask what time it is where you are.

The episode is a byproduct. The conversation is the product. But you can't have the conversation if you show up an hour late to it, and for a tool whose whole job is keeping track of when you're talking to people, telling you the wrong time is about as basic a failure as I can think of.