This confuses the scammers. In my area, there are frequent phone texts telling me that I have unpaid EZPass tolls (EZPass being the electronic toll system in the area); something impossible, of course, since it’s prepaid and linked to a credit card. But I’ve heard of people who moved to California getting the same scam, even though it’s a different company running the toll collection out there. Similar scams naming the utility company, etc., although many of the ones I’ve seen are generic; like “This is a message from your power company”.
But it is an interesting cultural shift; you no longer call a place, you call a person. And it blows my mind when I see old ads for Long Distance Calling, where by dialing direct, it’s only 50cents per minute!
Yes, that should have been area code. They add and remove them each year, but we do this two years in advance. So some of them do not start to be used until the map is ready for the next update.
We have had to change the time zone lines over the years. Most notifications come from nice people trying to help. Some from nasty people that take it personally. Since I do not want a high resolution available online, we provide clips of the map. Most of these clips zoom in on those areas we got help in fixing.
It’s really too bad that they didn’t just use STRAIGHT Meridian lines for the time zones. It would be a lot more fun if you were in CDT (or CST) and the person next door was in Eastern or Mountain!
Possibly THAT could have created enough energy to get rid of time changes as it would have added even more stupidity…
I do hate to admit that the current situation is a bit better than back in the days when there were not standard times and it resulted in lots of crashes with railroads all having their own ‘system’ as I recall.
I live in Kansas and if you look at the map there are a few counties on the western border of the state that observe Mountain Time. Those counties are low-populated, the rest of the state just moves right along on Central Time.
And then you have Arizona, which doesn’t us DST.
But the northwest corner of Az is mostly covered by the Navajo Nation, which DOES observe DST.
And then, fully within the Navajo Nation, you have the Hopi Nation, which does NOT observe DST.
Although, in fairness, it’s not as bad as Australia, where you have one time zone that is 30 minutes different from the one to the east; but to make up for it, the next one west is 1:30 different. So there’s an extra semi-official (depending on whom you ask) zone for about a dozen or so towns that splits the difference, being offset by 45 minutes.
I got tricked good yesterday. Went to work at the one man (and me) bookstore I work at and did not notice he had not moved the clock back (it is closed Sundays). I was happy to see that lunch time arrived in a timely manner. But I had a customer coming that always comes right at 5:00. When he didn’t show, I told myself I would wait until 5 minutes after for him. When that came and went I then wondered if when the clock got set back, maybe the boss was out by five mintues. Looked at my phone for the correct time and had to put the money back in the till, take off my coat, turn the lights back on, etc. since it was only 4:02. The store cat had no comment since her feeding time had been correct
