We were discussing time zones at work, and suddenly I had a refreshing thought: why do we have negative UTC offsets? This regularly causes bugs when translating times to dates. When you are in New York (UTC-0500), your local date is either the same as UTC date or one day behind. When you are in Norway (UTC+0100), the local date is either the same as UTC date or one day ahead.

I’ve seen this variability to cause real life issues. A few years ago I tried to buy a ticket to climb Galdhøpiggen, a mountain in Norway. The website didn’t work, I complained to the support, but they said everything was fine on their side. I debugged it a little, and found that they were handling negative UTC offsets incorrectly in JavaScript. I set my computer’s time zone to match Norway, and voila, the problem was solved.

This made me to think, wouldn’t it be nice if there were no negative UTC offsets? If the zero meridian was at the International Date Line, and we counted positive time offsets from there? New York would be NewUTC+0700, London would be NewUTC+1200, and Almaty would be NewUTC+1700? Of course, different places on Earth could still have different dates, but the local date would always be equal or ahead of NewUTC, never behind.

This might have hurt the national pride of the places that wanted to be the Zero Meridian, but it would remove the whole class of software bugs. Of course, the cost of the transition would be enormous, so this probably will never happen, but wouldn’t it be nice?