Published by Steve Litchfield at 12:05 UTC, February 1st
Q. I recently went to China for work. Just before I left the UK, I put in all flight details from Shanghai to LA. The Shanghai to LA flight was leaving on the Monday at 12:30 PM. When I arrived in Shanghai I changed my clock over to Shanghai time so I could set my alarms for the week. At this point the phone told me that all my Calendar enteries where being updated by 8 hours. So when I went into my Calendar for that Monday, my flight was now leaving at 8:30 PM. Why does the 9500 do this? No matter where I go on Earth the flight was still leaving at 12:30 PM local time. What can I do to stop this from happening in the future?
A. Time zone changes are often a subject of confusion, though if you think about it, the 9500 was behaving perfectly sensibly. The flight might well have been at 12:30 PM local time in Shanghai, but that moment would have been at 4:30 AM in the UK, and so on. Moreoever, you'd entered the time while you were in the UK, so the flight in Shanghai local time would be 12:30 PM plus eight hours. And when you actually travelled there and your system time got changed, the changes were automatically made to your Calendar.
Don't worry if you still find all this confusing, as there's a way to tell the 9500 to stop 'helping' in this regard. Go to 'Control panel | General | Date and time' and change 'Auto time update' to 'Off'. Entries will now no longer be adjusted when you move round the globe, although you'll also lose the automatic updating of your clock from the master clocks on the phone networks.
If you decide to keep 'Auto time update' on and want to enter a local time for some other part of the world, you'll need to do a quick mental calculation and enter it in your current time zone. E.g. entering the flight at 4:30 AM in the UK, which would be the exact moment the flight was leaving Shanghai.
Categories: Applications, Miscellaneous
Platforms: Series 80