My take on the usefulness of time zones

Slashdot had this discussion two years ago: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/ask-slashdot-could-we-deal-with-the-end-of-time-zones?sbsrc=thisday

Since I work at a company that is open 24 hours, and has international offices around the world, I may see this differently from some people. It seems that the most common argument for keeping time zones is that we still need to know when people's awake/sleep/available time are. At a company that is open all the time, with multiple locations, I find timezones only to be a hassle. I don't think there is much of a good reason to keep DST around except to complicate things, and for some people to opt-out of further, and for fun time-travel twice a year.

The only thing that really seems to be a true issue is that having the date change in the middle of the day kind of sucks. However, there are people on the graveyard shift where I work who start at approximately 10:00 p.m. and end at 6:00 a.m. the next day have to deal with it.

When working on my own local times, and thinking about what time people on the other side of the world work, I generally just memorize something like "Oh, Bob gets in at 5:00 and leaves at 1:00, and Mark works from 6:00 p.m. until whenever. I really don't care what time it is where Bob or Mark live, I just memorize a local time. It's a pain in the butt to memorize what days of the week people have off, and whether those days of the week are the same as mine, but in a 24/7 shop there will be someone else to work with those days anyway.

If we all used UTC or something, I would still memorize a number, but the number wouldn't arbitrarily change. And I wouldn't have to ask people what stupid time zone they are in. We could all just change our mail signatures or status messages to something like Bob - 13:00 - 21:00  Mark 3:00-11:00 and then people would know immediately when I'm working and contactable. It would be easy for someone to tell me when I can call them up, we wouldn't have to calculate off meaningless values that we can never remember anyway because of DST (but I don't think there's anyone who thinks DST is a good thing) which is extra confusion that doesn't help either method.

The complaint I have with using UTC is why should the folks in England get to use their current time? Seems a little unfair to me. I vote that whatever time zone I happen to be in right now (or ever) is the standard. I think to be fair, we need to pick a neutral place to be considered the "center of the world" or maybe use a completely new measurement system that doesn't favor any single location. How about epoch time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_time ? Can't get more arbitrary than that. Anyone know of a way of keeping time for the whole world at once (or, what about multiple worlds? What then?) that makes sense and doesn't play favorites to a single place? Maybe just make a 25 hour clock, since one of my professors one time said our bodies naturally fall into a 25 hour cycle, so everyone could take turns having noon be noon?

Update: Did some searches on "metric time". I decided it makes more sense to come up with arbitrary identifier names (which could easily be changed), but a day can stay the same.

1 day
10     ticks = 1 day (1 tick = 144 minutes )  (1 tick = 8640 sec)
100    Eep = 1 day   (1 eep = 14.4 minutes)   (1 eep = 864 sec)
1000   Creep = 1 day (1 creep = 1.44 minutes) (1 creep = 86.4 sec)
10000  Jig = 1 day   (1 jig = .144 minutes)   (1 jig = 8.64 sec)
100000 snap = 1 day  (1 snap = .0144 minutes) (1 snap = .864 sec)

Found this: http://www.metricclock.com/

Now to figure out how to divvy up a days. The restriction being ~365ish days is a year if we still care about revolutions around the sun, and the lunar cycle being approximately monthish.