As much of the United States rolls back off Daylight Saving Time, I am once again reminded of the absurdity of time zones.  Not just of DST, but of the entire concept of each area of the world being in a different time zone.  I wonder much productivity is lost each year as a result of people misunderstanding the time of meetings.  I’m a baseball fan who lives in the Central time zone, follows a team in the Mountain time zone, and reads about them on web sites that list game times in Eastern time.  When I am looking at my printed Rockies schedule, I need to add an hour to figure out the correct game time.  When I am looking at the schedule on ESPN.com, I need to subtract an hour.  On more than one occasion, I have gotten the game time wrong.

I am not the first person to suggest this idea, nor will I be the last.  However, I will shout it from the parapet of this magazine – stop the insanity.  Move to one single time zone.  It would be 06:00 everywhere in the world at the same time.  In some places, 06:00 would be breakfast time.  In other areas, it would be lunch time.  On the other side of the world. it would be bedtime.

There  would no , longer be confusion about time.  When someone schedules a meeting for 06:00, all of the attendees would know exactly what time the organizer intends.  There would be no more setting clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall.

So, then, what is standing in the way of this plan?  The human addiction to specific numbers dictating their lives.  People want to wake at 6, have lunch at noon, dinner at 5, and go to bed at 10.  They are resistant to having this balance upset, even those these are mere numbers.

In decades past, the differing time zones had very little impact on people’s lives.  Before the advent of the telephone, it was very rare to have any time-sensitive interactions with people in different time zones.  Even in the latter half of the twentieth century, most people only had to know what time it was in a few different time zones.

Today, however, we live in a global economy.  The readers of The Soap Boxers come from many different countries.  Not just the United States and Canada, but also Australia, New Zealand, India, England, Israel, Egypt, Malaysia and Singapore – and that’s just a sampling of readers from the past few days.  I read blogs written by bloggers in Australia, New Zealand, and China.  It would be nice if we could refer to times without forcing everyone to scramble to their favorite world time clock to figure out exactly what time is being referred to.

The comments section of this article will serve as a petition to move to a single time zone, tentatively referred to as “Kosmo Time”.  If you are in agreement with this plan, sign up below!  If I can get a majority of the world’s population to sign up, I will print off the petition (duplex, of course) and deliver it to someone who thinks they have the power to enact such a change.