What time is it in New Zealand?

What time is it? Time for another YouTube video, obviously. And that means it’s time for another behind-the-scenes post, complete with the script I used. This time, it's a little different.

This video was easier to do than my previous one, probably because I’d already remembered how to do the things I needed to do. That turned out to be a good thing.

I did most of the work on the video over last weekend, and even exported the video ready to upload to YouTube. I watched it a couple times (okay, more than a couple…), and, because I did, I finally heard and saw flaws before I uploaded.

So, I took advantage of a break in my workweek to re-record a couple parts of the narration that I wasn’t happy with. But there were also a couple visuals I didn’t like, either, so I fixed those. In the end, I went back to edit the video at least twice before I was finally finished—but I was still finished days ago, something that’s never happened before (I upload on Fridays my time, and up until now I’ve finished on the day). And still, despite all that, I missed one mistake.

I again recorded the narration separately (right after I recorded my most recent podcast episode), and I was again reading a script. I tried reading scripts and text in the early days of my podcast, and it didn’t go well—which is why in all these years I haven’t used a script for my podcast. I think I’ve improved a lot over the years—better vocal control timing, intonation, etc.—so all that listening closely to what other podcasters and video creators do vocally has paid off. In my opinion.

At the moment, I’m out of ideas for topics for future videos. I also think I may be nearing the end of the road for videos with animated text and still images with a voice over. I know that many YouTube creators stick to one style for all their videos, so it’s not that I couldn’t or shouldn’t do that—it’s that I don’t want to.

Fortunately, I’m more mobile again, which means I can shoot some actual video, something that may eventually even include me. All of that is very different from what I’ve been doing lately, but since I’ve made several videos with footage I recorded, I think it should go well.

First, though, I need to come up with some topics.

In the meantime, here’s the script for this video—this time, with some annotations about why I did what I did:

On Sunday, September 25 at 2am, the clocks sprang ahead to 3am. They’ll go back to standard time April 3rd.

Many places in the world use Daylight Saving Time, and there’s no international standard for when clocks change. It usually has to do with the needs of each country. But this makes an already complicated situation even worse

Take a look at this map of world time zones. The lines zig zag all over the place, to make sure all of one country is in the same time zone, to make it better for international trade, for any number of reasons. It’s very complicated, and Daylight Saving Time only makes it worse. [I almost re-recorded this part to avoid saying “even worse” twice—something I didn’t notice when I wrote the script or when I recorded it. In the end I didn’t mainly because I didn’t have time to re-record it (I’d already done the other bits)].

Let’s look at how that works using Auckland and Chicago.

[This next section is mainly visual, and it was a challenge to illustrate. I chose to show the clock changing for the location that was changing their clocks, leaving the other one alone. In an earlier draft version, I left Auckland alone and always changed Chicago—but the final clock change is happening in New Zealand, and it didn’t make sense to me to show the clock change happening in Chicago].

Here’s the time—and day of week—in the two cities now,

And this is what will happen after Illinois turns its clocks back to Standard Time on November 6th.

Then, on March 12, Illinois starts Daylight Saving Time again.

Followed by New Zealand going back to standard time.

So, anyone trying to work out the time in New Zealand, or the difference between our time and the time anywhere else in the world, has to know both the number of time zones AND whether one or both locations is observing Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time. That’s nearly impossible.
Fortunately, there are plenty of technological options.

I put clocks on both my blog and my podcast site so visitors can know what time it is in New Zealand and Chicago. [I didn’t use video or even screenshots of those clocks because I couldn’t do both at the same time. That mattered because they display the time and date, and it would be obvious if they didn’t match]. But smartphones have apps to show the time in various places, and they automatically re-set when the clocks change.

By using an app or a website, you can make sure that you don’t ring someone in another country in the middle of the night. Before apps and easy access to websites, people did that to me. [they really did, too].

There’s one more thing about these clock changes that makes New Zealand a little different: We don’t have Fall, we have Autumn.

That wouldn't matter, except the old saying, “Spring ahead, Fall back” doesn’t really mean much in New Zealand. So, a lot of people I know have trouble remembering which way to set their clocks.

So, even though it’s nearly impossible to know what time it is in another part of the world, technology means no one NEEDS to know—they can check.

And THAT means that I no longer get phone calls in the middle of the night.

But it doesn’t make it any easier to adjust to those changes!

Full credits, along with other resources, are in the YouTube description of the video.