Hurray for time zones - for once!

Having worked on a PIM product, I’ve learned to swear at time zones. They’re an enormously complicated business. More than once I’ve thought: Wow - we should be like China and have just one time zone. But then I come to my senses and realize that living in the West Coast, that would probably impact me more than if I lived in New York again.

In any case, for once in a long time, time zones came to my advantage. At 8:50pm tonight, I had a question about Apple’s return policy - if you buy something from their site, can you return it in the store? I looked for a quick bit and couldn’t find the answer on their website. So instead, I called the local store in Valley Fair - only to find that it closes at 7pm on Sunday. Undeterred, I thought about it for a minute and realized that it was only 6:50pm in Honolulu. So I called Hawaii and asked them the same question (btw, the answer is Yes). Hurray!

The last time I did this was in high school - I had a question about which store location near me had a certain product. So I called a location in California and asked them to check their inventory records in NY. Can’t really pull that trick anymore. (Especially since Herman’s is now out of business!)