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And then you got customers in another timezone and suddenly you're in a big mess.

Unfortunately, it seems most people don't understand UTC. For a brief period, when talking to customers and other employees who I knew were in another timezone, I would always refer to times in UTC, e.g. 14:30 UTC. A lot of them didn't understand and either got the maths wrong or thought I was referring to their timezone, which is why I stopped doing it. They would rather use their timezones or mine.

One issue I’ve had with having my local machine on UTC is that people in the same time zone won’t always specify the time zone and things like mail clients will guess and automatically convert times.

I gave up after missing meetings a couple times this way.

Customers? He works at the University of Toronto.

Many universities these days have students scattered around the world in various distance education programs, or have students/staff/faculty at various other locations doing research in collaboration with other labs, facilities, etc.

Then there are their research partners, which again may be scattered around the world, etc.

So, no not customers in the traditional sense, but they depend on University services, and many of them are paying for the privilege.

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