I seriously misread my itinerary and freaked out. Time differences are scary stuff!
Reader-added tags include "You're in big trouble, Kogasa-san", "International Date Line", "The blind spot of international travel" and "Around the World in Reverse in 80 Days".
The poll considers a vaguely similar situation:
This video's overdue! What should I do? • Stay in a rut for a while. • Panic and go to return it. • A day or two, who cares!? • Begin the chicken race. • I'm going to travel back in time, QB!
Oh man, do I know that feel. I was so confused when I had to arrange for my friends to pick me up at the airport upon returning to Thailand - they showed up one day early to wait for me, but I was still on the plane. Calculating arrival times when you're returning from North America to Asia sucks.
Oops, looks like Kogasa-san made a slight miscalculation. Maybe she should have let Sanae-san handle the rental, since she seems a bit better able to calculate things. Well, no big deal having to pay a late fee for a day, right? I'm sure it happens all the time.
For the poll, a day or two, who cares? No worries, right? Not like fees are so steep that some Internet based rental company and a vending machine based rental company will come along and steal all the business from the video rental places, right? On that note, how many people know where to find a still open Blockbuster?
BadRoad said: Apparently, the International Date Line works backwards from how I thought it did.
The way to remember it is that if you keep going west, you subtract an hour when you cross a timezone. Go all the way around the world and you will have subtracted 24h, meaning you'll need to add a day to get back in sync with the people who stayed home.
If you go east things are reversed: you add hours until you're 24h ahead and need to subtract a day.
The International Date Line is a standardized place on the globe for doing that correction, because things would be a mess if it was only done when you go entirely around the world (because it would be different for everyone, so you'd regularly run into tourists that are currently in yesterday or tomorrow).
I can relate to this. When I has reserved a hotel for Reitaisai, I got that international date line reversed, resulted in me coming into my hotel a day late. Bleh.
Disoriented said: Oh man, do I know that feel. I was so confused when I had to arrange for my friends to pick me up at the airport upon returning to Thailand - they showed up one day early to wait for me, but I was still on the plane. Calculating arrival times when you're returning from North America to Asia sucks.
I had the exact opposite problem back around 2007. I was heading out of Thailand to a symposium in South Africa and had arranged for a taxi to pick me up at the airport. When I got there, it turned out I was a day early. Good thing another attendee arrived on the same day I did so we took the same cab.
The_Shadow said: About half a mile away. Know of a second one about 10 miles away.
Four years living here and the closest I've come to going in was using the parking lot to turn around in.
Huh... there aren't any around here. I haven't seen one in ages. (All the video rental stores in this area are gone.)I never really liked their prices anyway.
What's wrong...?What?!You said that you'll be coming back on the 9th, right?Then wouldn't that mean you'll arrive in Japan on the 10th instead?I only rented this international data communication terminal up to the 9th!!Then what about the late fees?!...Kogasa...?Yep. I'll be taking the evening flight on the 8th here.Returning to the hotel.I don't know!What do I do? What do I do?I'm going home tomorrow already... sure was quick...Hmm...Shock...