Time Zone Troubles - TV Tropes

It's gettin' lonely livin' upside down
I don't even wanna be in this town
Tryin' to figure out the time zones makin' me crazy

• This comes up near the end of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, where it's pointed out that Shirogane has to constantly stay up late just to be able to video chat with everyone after he starts attending Stanford, resulting in him keeping his Exhausted Eye Bags despite the reduced work load.

• Astro City: The Silver Adept frequently loses track of critical magical events because she forgets what time zone (whether on Earth or elsewhere) they're occurring in. Fortunately, her secretary keeps her on track — usually...

  Silver Adept: No sweat, I'll work on them this morning.
  Raitha: This morning? You've got the Himalayan Convocation in an hour!
  Silver Adept: No, that's not 'til tonight. It needs starlight to–
  Raitha: It's in the Himalayas — it's already tonight there!

• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • In Don Rosa's "Island at the Edge of Time", Uncle Scrooge and Flintheart Glomgold race around the world to get to an island of gold that happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right on the International Date Line. This causes some confusion over who was the first to set foot on the island, until the claim ends up going to the guide Scrooge hired, who comes from a poor island nation and gleefully accepts the windfall to help out his homeland.
  • In the Millennium Orb Saga, time zones are crucial for Meringue's second attempt at forging the Artifact of Doom in 1999 — as long it is made during the turn to the New Millennium, it doesn't matter where it is done, with him specifically going to the last point on Earth where the year 2000 will arrive.
• Lucky Luke: In "The Pony Express", in order to get a reward of $50,000 from the government the new Pony Express has to prove it is able to bring mail from Sacramento to St. Joseph in less than ten days, with the penalty of failure being that the money will go to the Pacific Railway. The Pacific Railway naturally does everything it can to sabotage the Pony Express, and at first it seems they succeeded when Lucky Luke arrives in St. Joseph six minutes and 30 seconds after the ten-day deadline expires. However, Luke points out to everyone that there is a time difference of 1 hour and 45 minutes between the two cities, meaning the Pony Express made it within ten days after all. Mr. Packman, the government representative overseeing the wager, concedes the point and declares the Pony Express the winner.

• The Arithmancer: Downplayed in Chapter 9 of the sequel Annals of Arithmancy, where Hermione, George, Harry, and Luna travel around the world by Portkey to celebrate the turn of the millennium nine times across the globe. While the four succeed in doing so, the chapter is punctuated with repeated comments about how tight their schedule is and that they can't stay too long in one place as a result, whether it's to chat with family and friends or to testify for a Death Eater attack.
• Bad Traffic SMP Ideas: Invoked. 5 AM Life (alternately titled Pearl Life) is suggested as a hypothetical season of the Life SMP where the time of recording is solely convenient for the only Australian in the cast, Pearl, while no one else gets to have "decent amounts of sleep" due to living in Europe or North America in real life. A similar proposal, Australian Life, sets the hypothetical season's time of filming in the middle of the Australian day, whereas it would be evening or late night for the rest of the cast.
• Create Your Own Fate: Inverted. Kanril Eleya is called to the city of Hathon in the middle of the night, local time, and Commander Jackson apologizes for getting her out of bed. However, Eleya's apartment in Kendra City is on the other side of the planet and it's mid-morning there, so she was already awake.

• National Treasure: Ben, Riley, and Abigail need to find an 18th-century clue at Independence Hall, which is dependent on where exactly the shadow of its bell tower falls at exactly 2:32 PM. They initially despair when they realize it's past 2:32 and will have to wait another day. However, Riley remembers that it's currently daylight savings time, which didn't exist in the 18th century, so they have to look at 3:32 instead.
• New Year's Evil: Played for Horror. The killer travels from east to west to commit murder at the stroke of midnight in four different time zones.
• In Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., when Viper Von Strucker holds a video conference with HYDRA's lieutenants around the world, the Cairo lieutenant points out to her that he was asleep when she called him due to the time difference between their locations, so he hopes for her that she had a good reason to wake him up.
• The Parent Trap (1998): When Hallie and Annie pull their Twin Switch, Hallie goes to Annie's home in London, England while Annie goes to Hallie's home in Napa, California. With an 8-hour time difference, this causes some issues as they try to stay in contact without letting their families know. At one point, when Annie-as-Hallie is caught talking to the real Hallie in the bathroom, she almost gets caught in a lie because she miscalculated the time difference:

  Chessy: Of course, I'd oversleep too if I was up at midnight making mysterious phone calls from my bathroom.
  Annie: Oh, that. I was calling a friend from camp. Mildred. She lives in New York.
  Chessy: Oh, I see, and you wanted to call Mildred at a time that was convenient for her. Because of the time difference.
  Annie: Exactly! Because of the time difference.
  Chessy: Uh-huh. So you waited until it was three in the morning her time. That makes perfect sense.
  Annie: Actually, it was seven at night her time. You see, she lives in New York but she was on vacation with her family in… Bora Bora.^note 

• Serving Sara: The Divorce Assets Conflict between Sara and Gordon ultimately hinges on which of them can serve divorce papers to the other first. Although Gordon's amoral agent finds Sara first, he forgets he's traveled across time zones and postdates the papers by a few hours, letting the protagonist Race Against the Clock to serve Gordon before they take effect.
• Sleepless in Seattle: When Jonah in Seattle calls Dr. Fieldstone's radio show back during his dad's date, it's the middle of the night for Annie and Becky in Baltimore. When Becky tells Annie to listen in to the radio call, knowing Annie is interested in Jonah's dad, Annie, trying to keep her fiancé Walter asleep, listens to the radio in the downstairs closet.

• Around the World in Eighty Days: Crossing the International Date Line is a crucial plot point for the novel. It seemingly takes 81 days for Phileas Fogg and his valet Jean Passepartout to complete his journey around the world that he wagered half his fortune on to complete in 80 days. However, although they experienced the same amount of time abroad as people had experienced in London, since they travelled eastward, it hasn't been 80 days in London since they started the trip, and Fogg is able to hurry back to the Reform Club just in time to win The Bet.
• One Encyclopedia Brown case hinges on this: Encyclopedia's cousin lost his job at a firm for apparently ignoring an emergency call for a rush order, but Encyclopedia soon figures out that because the call came from the West Coast, what seemed like afternoon to the caller would've been long after someone on the East Coast clocked out.
• In The Princess Diaries, one of the reasons for Mia's Surprise Pregnancy is that she constantly flies between Genovia (Europe) and New York (America) and did not adjust the schedule of her birth control pills to compensate.
• Red Thread Sisters: After Wen is adopted and moves to Boston, whenever she wants to or has to contact the orphanage she was adopted from, she's often reminded that there's a 12- to 13-hour time difference between the American East Coast and China, so she usually has to wait to make her calls around dinner, timing them to be when the orphanage is awake and having breakfast. While it never gets down to the wire in the story, the Race Against the Clock for her best friend Shu Ling to be adopted before she ages out is intensified by the fact that Wen has an earlier deadline than she originally expected due to China being half a day ahead of the US.
• Safehold: Once the Inner Circle starts expanding to more areas than just Charis, com conferences start to run into time zone issues. It's not unusual for characters to have to wake up in the middle of the night to take part in them.

• Around the World in 80 Days (2021): Used in Episode 8. In an Adaptation Deviation from the book, the Power Trio arrives back in London with one day to spare before the deadline… and are arrested the minute they get off the ship due to an open warrant from Episode 5. They're released the next afternoon and dejectedly go to Fogg's house, assuming they've lost the bet, only to be reminded by Fogg's butler that they gained a day relative to London when they crossed the International Date Line eastbound. Cue a mad dash to the Reform Club to win The Bet.
• Babylon 5:
  • Played for Laughs in "The Hour of the Wolf". Londo Mollari calls his assistant Vir from Babylon 5 and then has to apologize for getting him out of bed because of the time difference between Babylon Five and where Londo is on Centauri Prime. The long-suffering Vir mumbles that "I was just about to get up… in about six hours."
  • In the TV movie "A Call to Arms" Captain Lochley calls Earth Alliance President Luchenko, even though it's 3:00am where the President lives to warn her of an impending Drakh attack on Earth.
• An episode of Benson (from when the title character was lieutenant governor) had the governor's mansion host a delegation of the heads of Pacific Island nations. The delegation is disrupted when two of the heads start bickering to the point where they declare war on each other. It later comes out that the two were formerly engaged and planned to be married, but both claim that the other never showed up for the wedding. Benson then remembers that the two countries are on opposite sides of the International Date Line. When this detail is discovered, they cancel the war and decide to give the relationship another try.
• The Brittas Empire: The 1996 edition of the Royal Performance Variety Show features an appearance by the staff under the pretense of an inspection, which starts with Brittas being surprised by the fact that there's still people there as the show should have ended two hours ago. Julie suggests that it's because the people have changed their clocks back, upon which Brittas tells them that it's illegal for them to do so as new Euro guidelines mean that they're now in "European Permanent Time". Carole soon discovers that the theatre they're inspecting goes through two timezones, leaving a three-hour difference which Brittas and the others take to mean that half the audience has already seen the show and the other half hasn't even arrived.
• CSI: NY: When Mac returns from a 10-day vacation at the beginning of "Time's Up", he jumps straight into a case involving a murder atop the Statue of Liberty. Later, he's looking a bit haggard, so Stella asks him why he doesn't just go home. He replies that he's still on London time and that they're having breakfast there.
• House of Anubis: This comes up briefly while Mick is in Australia. He and Mara attempt to have a long-distance relationship, which includes video calls. She talks to him when it's night for her, which for Mick is very early in the morning. He insists he doesn't mind being tired if he can talk to her.
• M*A*S*H: The time difference between the US and Korea causes multiple problems in many episodes. It already isn't easy connecting calls from the war front, and Radar is often the only one who can calculate what time it is back in the States, frustrating anyone trying to get ahold of a loved one back home.
• Mayday: The pilots of FedEx Express Flight 80 had crossed eight time zones in the 10 days leading up to the crash at Narita International Airport, a factor in which was the pilots being fatigued due to the resulting jet lag causing them to not use enough of their rest time to catch up on sleep.
• An episode of Medium has Alison dream of a plane crashing into a prison and allowing a serial killer to escape. She calls the prison an hour before the plane crash is supposed to occur, only for it to happen while she's on the phone. It turns out that the plane was flying in from another time zone and the occupants hadn't set their watches back yet.
• Mom: When Christy goes to Georgetown Law School, she starts calling Bonnie at 7:00 AM, forgetting that for Bonnie, it's 4:00 AM.

  Bonnie: She can get a full scholarship to law school but she can't subtract by three.

• Ted Lasso: With Ted in England and his wife and son back home in Kansas, time zone differences come up frequently:
  • In "Pilot", Ted comes off the flight from Kansas to London jet-lagged and having not slept at all. Arriving in Richmond, he is forced to do a press conference right away and is overwhelmed by the journalists' questions combined with his lack of knowledge about soccer, capped off by him spitting his water at the crowd because he wasn't expecting it to be carbonated. This is revealed to have been exploited by Rebecca, who wanted Ted to look bad as part of her efforts to sabotage her ex-husband's team.
  • In "Carol of the Bells", when young Terry Higgins is skeptical that Santa could be fast enough to get gifts to all the children of the world in one night, Sam points out that because the world is split up into different time zones, the question is not Santa's speed but his endurance to get through such a long night. Terry is astonished.
  • In "Signs", Ted is struggling to touch base with his son after hearing that he bullied another kid at school, leading to this exchange:

    Coach Beard: You connect with Henry yet?
    Ted: No, we keep missing each other. Why can't the world just have one big time zone, you know?
    Coach Beard: The Sun.
    Ted: Right, the gosh-dang Sun.

• The West Wing:
  • In "Ellie" a PR scandal with the Surgeon General occurs while the President is in Japan. The rest of the staff, still in Washington D.C., spend several minutes trying to work out how long they have before they have to inform the President, and immediately get confused because of the number of timezones and daylight savings. C.J. points out that there are multiple clocks on the wall showing different timezones and the exact time at the President's current location.
  • In the fourth season premiere, Josh, Toby and Donna are accidentally left behind after a campaign stop. Their attempts to catch up to the Presidential motorcade hits a snag when a passerby informs them that they crossed from a county that observes Daylight Savings into one that doesn't (or possibly the other way around, the characters aren't sure), so they're now an hour behind what they thought the time was. Donna suddenly realises that she hasn't been able to get any of the staff on the phone because they've already boarded Air Force One. Josh and Toby have a brief Heroic BSoD over the ridiculousness of this error.

    Tyler: It's a common mistake.
    Josh: NOT FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT!

• Zoey 101: When Chase moves to England, he tries to talk with Zoey online. Unfortunately, it's so early in the morning for him that his roommate, Collin, is constantly angry at him for talking all night and constantly calls him a "nit".

• "4 AM" by Derivakat is about fans of Minecraft roleplay series like the Dream SMP and their unwavering dedication to watching livestreams live, even if it means staying up "until the dawn". The song repeatedly alludes to the Sleep Deprivation the fandom suffers from if it means being able to "hear and see [the creator-characters'] point of view".

  Say, say I'll stay awake
  And watch these restless nights turn into days
  So say, say you'll stay up too
  We know we're overdue for some shut-eye, instead I
  Surrender all my sleep to you

• "Jet Lag" by Simple Plan is about a Long-Distance Relationship where the singers lament struggling with keeping contact due to time zone differences and missing when they were together in the same place where they didn't have to worry about these issues.

  You say good morning when it's midnight
  Going out of my head, alone in this bed
  I wake up to your sunset
  It's drivin' me mad
  I miss you so bad

• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: In the opening case, Larry Butz' girlfriend Cindy Stone is murdered using a speaking clock Larry had bought for her. She had just come back from a vacation and the clock was still several hours off due to time zone differences between her home and her destination, so the supposed witness getting the time of the murder wrong proves he must have been inside the apartment and therefore must be the murderer.
  • Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: In "Turnabout Airlines", the time zone ends up playing a huge part in breaking down Lablanc's testimony. Lablanc's testimony hinges on him seeing the victim enter the crime scene by himself less than 15 minutes before his death, something which is used to incriminate Edgeworth since he was the only person known to be in the same area at the time, and there was no indication that there was anyone else prior to the first investigation. It turns out, however, that Mr. Lablanc had in fact screwed up because he had set his watch to the wrong time zone in anticipation of an exclusive movie that he can only see on international flights. As a result, the time gap between Hicks' last moments alive and his actual time of death is much bigger than Lablanc realized.

• Love and Capes: In one issue, superhero (and accountant) Crusader forgets to do his own taxes until 11:30 PM on April 15th; he has to have them finished and in the mail by midnight. Even using his Super-Speed powers, he is unable to finish them until 2 AM the next day. This is no problem, since he lives in the Eastern Time Zone; he just flies at super speed to the West Coast and mails his taxes in before midnight Pacific time.

• Tom Scott talks in a Computerphile video titled "The Problem with Time & Timezones" which is a ten-minute spiel about how much of a pain dealing with time zones is for a computer programmer, which piles on more and more complexity and increasing frazzledness of a computer programmer trying to deal with how humans track time.
• Critical Role:
  • Because the main campaigns livestream on Thursday nights at 7 PM PST and can last 3–5 hours or more, each episode is rebroadcast at 12 AM PST and 9 AM PST on Fridays before being uploaded to YouTube on Monday at 12 PM PST, so that those in other timezones can watch when they like. The affiliate site wheniscriticalrole.com counts down to the next live broadcast for those in other time zones, which is especially helpful for international fans during daylight savings time.
  • Campaign 3: Jester impulsively delivers a magical Sending to Braius's estranged ex-fiancée, forgetting that she lives far to the east of their current location. It wakes her up in the middle of the night and goes downhill from there.

    Game Master: …being dusk here in Issylra, it is early, early morning.
    Travis: That's never a consideration.

• Played for Laughs in Dropout's "Bicoastal Time Zone Lesson" (originally made when they were still CollegeHumor), in which Raph stars in a children's show teachings kids about time zones, only for him to get more and more aggressive towards his adorable puppet co-host for constantly calling him at what is the middle of the night for Raph.

  Raph: That means, if it's 8 AM where you live in New York, then it's 5 AM where I live in LA and don't fucking text me.

• Most of the creators of the greater Minecraft content creation community are based in the Americas or Europe, meaning recordings for collaborative series often cater more to their time zones and thus take place in the middle of the night for those who live in the Asia-Pacific region. One of the most notable exceptions to this geographical distribution is PearlescentMoon, who is Australian and whose sleep-deprived state of mind often carries over to her characters during group recordings.
  • In Hermitcraft, she can often be heard mentioning how tired she is during recordings, and one of her card's abilities in the Season 9 TCG is named "5 AM" after a Running Gag in the Life SMP.
  • Since several seasons of the Life SMP are filmed very early in the morning in her time zone, Pearl's at-times unhinged behaviour in the series is often attributed to the resultant Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy (or more often, Insanity). This is especially the case in the Double Life SMP, where her character undergoes severe Sanity Slippage and gains a reputation for being The Dreaded as "5 AM Pearl", and ends up murdering four people on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge at the end of the season.

• Arthur: In "The Perfect Game", Francine has to build a model city for school, and she wants the sports stadium to be perfect — especially after she sees how impressive Muffy and George's project is. She does research and leans about the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which she wants to model her stadium after, and goes to message Arthur's Turkish pen pal, Adil, about it. Catherine points out that it's the middle of the night for him, so he won't be able to respond.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In "Foster's Goes to Europe", Mr. Herriman presents Mac with a detailed schedule of the trip the friends are about to go on, and Mac muses that it must have been hard for him given the time zone difference. It turns out Herriman didn't even take that into account, and he immediately takes the list back for revision.
• In the Garfield and Friends episode "Monday Misery", Garfield, in a desperate attempt to make it through Monday, mails himself to Samoa. However, he fails to take the International Date Line into account, so it's still Monday when he arrives there.
• Serves as the central plot point of the The Magic School Bus Rides Again episode "In the Zone". The bus has to download an important update and in order to do so, the class has to keep ahead of sunset by rapidly flying west to switch time zones. At the very end, it seems as though the class has failed and the bus loses all of its magic. Thankfully, Jyoti is able to restore the bus back to normal by setting its clock to true solar time.

• When basketball player Marvin Barnes had to get on a flight from Louisville, Kentucky to St. Louis, Missouri, he saw that the flight would land earlier than when it would depart due to the difference in time zone.^note  He famously said, "I ain't getting on no time machine," and decided to rent a car for the trip instead.
• When The Lord of the Rings became popular in the USA, American fans would excitedly phone the author to gush about how they love it… in the middle of the night, since not a few of them failed to account for the time zones (as lunchtime in California is the middle of the night in the Midlands).
• In 1992, a bomb carried by Palestinian terrorists exploded an hour early (that is, while still being carried by the terrorists) due to time zone differences. Israel has switched from daylight saving earlier than the rest of the world that use DST (including the Palestinian regions) to accommodate pre-sunrise prayer; the bomb is set on daylight saving yet the driver has switched to standard- time.
• Some historians believe that the multiplicity of timezones involved on December 7th/8th, 1941 contributed to the outbreak of war between Japan and the USA in World War II. Admiral Yamamoto insisted the Americans should have received some sort of warning prior to the attack, in accordance with the accepted rule of law. He favoured a message to be sent by the Japanese Embassy in Washington no later than thirty minutes prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, this involved coordinating Tokyo time (UTC+09:00), Hawaii time (UTC−10:30 at the time)^note , and Washington DC time (UTC−05:00): three time zones spanning half the world. Due to this and coding problems, the Japanese "declaration of war"^note  did not arrive with the US government until quite a few hours after the attack had finished.