Westcoasters, do you ever get the feeling that the day is a little soiled used and tawdry by the time it gets to you?

Here in the East I listen to the morning news replayed from London and I get the feeling that those in early timezones have conspired to ruin things before I can even gulp down the morning tea.

Nah, it allows us to coast through the rest of the day a little more.

it's like a heads up. "don't make the same mistakes we did". or not.

Time zones are so weird.

i miss being 3 hrs behind--the best part is sports in the morning

being able to wake up and turn on an NFL game is pretty awesome, but OTOH I've always been jealous of the fact that east coast ppl can watch sports games late into the night

Your Oscar parties start way earlier, too.

but we still don't get the award shows live! this was prolly less of a big deal before the internet, when it'd still be difficult to find out who won the oscar or whatever somewhat without calling someone.

er minus 'somewhat'

When my family moved from Mountain time to Eastern, I was sort of baffled that the popular late-night talk shows I thought everyone watched were actually on really late at night. (I also had serious trouble figuring out which networks did and did not have tape delays for Mountain time, and vaguely missed whatever premium-channel time issue allowed Coloradan kids to see half-scrambled Cinemax softcore starting around 9pm. Also I had trouble wrapping my head around the Michigan bottle deposit.)

Back when this board was super-English I'd be bummed that by the time I checked in, lots of the threads had either petered out or developed into weird arguments; now that it's super-American but I don't check in until the afternoon, same thing.

To be honest I still don't know what the deal was with Central vs. Mountain tape delays -- all I know is that there were two stages:

- something was on at 6 Mountain so I tune in at 8 Eastern and it's not on and my brother goes "It's only a one-hour difference, dumbass, there's a tape delay"

- something was on at 6 Mountain so I tune in at 7 Eastern and it's not on and my brother goes "You realize it's a two-hour difference, right?"

central time is just right

When my family moved from Mountain time to Eastern, I was sort of baffled that the popular late-night talk shows I thought everyone watched were actually on really late at night.

My family went on vacation to NYC in 1989, and my dad spotted Dave Letterman's stage manager Biff Henderson on the sidewalk. (There is a photo somewhere of a 10-year-old me looking really embarrassed standing next to Biff Henderson.) Later, when my dad told my uncle (whose house we were staying at) who we'd seen, my uncle said, "I don't know who that is. Letterman doesn't come on until 12:30 AM."

I sort of got accustomed to Eastern when I was in Michigan for college, but it still strikes me as absurdly late to have local news on at like 11 PM, since I assume lots of people are going to bed around then.

West Coast is a secret world! We get the late baseball games that come on at 10PM Eastern that no one on the East Coast watches.
If you stay up past midnight on the West Coast, you're into 8-9AM UK time so you can make phone calls to real live Europeans.
We get to watch the sun set over the ocean.

The biggest drag is having to come to 8AM meetings at work because offices in other time zones are participating.

Traders at the Pacific Stock Exchange in SF used to have to get to work at 5AM or something insane like that.