Spending A New York Day On New Zealand Time

I love my job. I’m paid by my darling little media company to blend the collective rage of fed-up consumers into a fuel that powers one of the best consumer advocacy sites around. Consumerist fulfills my to desire to enact meaningful change better than my government service. And it’s fun! Seriously, my job is to yell at things that anger me. It doesn’t get better than this, and I don’t want to quit because I’m moving halfway around the world.

The site is a business, and I can’t keep my job with a sentimental appeal. I need numbers. So this weekend I posted as if I was in New Zealand.

Thanks to the time change, midnight here (the earliest I can start posting) is 7pm there. Writing from 7pm-10pm isn’t a problem, but I wanted to see how posting from 12am-3am affected our traffic, reserving the second half of my posts for later in the day. If I wake up at 8am in New Zealand, it’s 3pm here. So I loosed the second batch of posts from 3pm-6pm.

One snag: one of my stories landed on Digg. An excellent, enviable problem on any other day, but it detracts from the purity of my numbers. It was submitted around 3am by one of Digg’s top users, but I noticed it around 8am and added a Digg button to the post, which helps it move. Even without the ~25,000 views from that post, I still pulled in ~225,000 views, which is par for the course. So far, so good!

The other option is to keep my normal posting schedule and become a nocturnimal. I usually post from 8am-1pm, which translates to 3am-god-knows-when. While this might be more in keeping with New Zealand’s European nightlife, I’d prefer to be a coffee-house patronizing semi-mature mid-20-something while I’m over there, not unemployed post-college me circa 2004. I want to wake-up, not stay up for sunrises.

Oy, keeping all these times straight is going to require one of those situation-room clocks. Either way, it reminds me of this exchange from the West Wing:

JOSH
All right. First things first what time is it in Tokyo?

TOBY
They’re fourteen hours ahead.

JOSH
I thought it was thirteen.

TOBY
Eastern daylight.

JOSH
So it’s fourteen hours ahead.

TOBY
Yes.

JOSH
Are we sure it’s ahead, and not behind?

C.J.
Guys, there are clocks on the wall.

Everyone but Sam looks at the clocks.

JOSH
Okay, so it’s almost 11 o’clock in Tokyo.

(Photo: Detail of a prominent clock on Courtenay Place. )