sunday april 20, 2008

Timely Acronyms / San Francisco, CA / 22 days ago

I don't know when it started and I don't know why I am so compulsively obsessed, but it drives me completely insane that so many people are unaware of the difference between Standard Time and Daylight Time in their communications.

For example, when organizing a phone call or a meeting with someone's personal assistant in say, June, and that person writes "how does 1pm PST work for you?", I sometimes respond "That will be fine, should I put it down as noon or did you mean PDT?", which is totally obnoxious of me, I know... but I can't help it. I get especially bent out of shape when the acronym mis-usage comes from a lawyer, aren't these folks paid ridiculous rates to accurately communicate while crossing all of their t's and dotting every i?

I'm not sure whether it has to do with a lineage of time-sensitive engineering types on my father's side, but somewhere between the railroad engineer, the television engineer and the industrial engineer I have become a relentless time acronym enforcer and it is driving me nuts.

All I can ask is that everyone please do your part to make sure that more people understand how to properly communicate the accurate acronym when referencing the time... and if that's too complicated, then just skip the daylight savings bit altogether and reduce your acronym length by 33.3% by using PT, ET, etc.