K’s Weblog

OK, I know the term is unlikely to catch on, but the fact remains that people in less populous time zones are often shafted by those who live in larger population centres. In North America, that typically means those on the east coast ignore us westerners (see Western Alienation).

Members of the media are notorious for this. Reporting than an event will be televised at 7:00. Of course when you tune in at 7:00 to catch the hockey game or whatever, you get there just in time to watch the post-game highlights. Why? The game started at 4:00 for us west-coasters.

The latest incidence of this came tonight when I tried to download and install Parallels Desktop for my MacBook. When I requested an activation key (at 9:30 pm) I was given a key which had a license date starting on Feb 18th (which is still about two and a half hours from now!!) Because the server that generated the license was somewhere east of here (where it is already Feb 18th) it generated a code that the software won’t let me use for another two hours and nineteen minutes.

I will be sending a note to the Parallels support people with a link to this entry. Hopefully someone will take notice and in the future the software will generate a key which will take into account the large variety of time zones in this world. Surely a company that can make it possible to run Windows on the Macintosh can figure a way around a simple time zone issue.

While this won’t change the world, perhaps pointing out incidences of timezoneism will help to remediate the discrimination that all those of us on the west coast face on a daily basis.

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