So a little while ago, I was griping ardently on Facebook and Twitter about this stupid fracking thing my iPhone calendar had started doing. (I know, I know — first world problems.) If I entered an event into my calendar for (say) 5pm, and I then flew from the Pacific time zone to the Eastern time zone, my phone would ever-so-helpfully change the time of the event — of all the events in my calendar — to reflect the time change. The 5pm event in my calendar would get changed to 8pm.
So if I entered, oh, say, just to pick an example completely at random, A FLIGHT DEPARTURE TIME of 5pm, it would ever-so-helpfully change the time of that flight in my calendar to 8pm. If I’d made an appointment for a lunch meeting in San Francisco at noon, when I was on the East Coast it would tell me the appointment was at 3pm. Etc.
Useless. Completely useless.
I asked around on Facebook and Twitter, seeing if anyone knew of a fix for this. A few people suggested turning Time Zone Support on — or off, I forget which is which — a setting in which you could enter both the time of an event and the time zone it was happening in… but that didn’t work, either. If you entered a 5pm event and told the calendar it was in Chicago, and you then went to the East Coast, it would tell you the time of the event in East Coast time… not in Chicago time. And for events during which time zones changed — such as oh, say, just to pick an example completely at random, A FLIGHT DEPARTURE AND LANDING TIME starting in New York and ending in San Francisco — it was completely useless. There was no way to tell the calendar, “This event starts in one time zone and ends in another.”
All I wanted was a calendar in which I could enter the time of an event, and have it NOT FUCKING WELL CHANGE from the time that I had entered. I enter events in the way that makes sense to me, and I wanted them to stay exactly the way I entered them.
When I put out the desperate, anguished cry for help on Facebook and Twitter, a whole bunch of people begged me, “If you get a solution, will you please please please tell me?” Apparently my despair and anguish are echoed across the globe.
So I have a solution, one that was suggested by a couple of different people. (Sorry, I don’t remember who now — if it was you, tell me in the comments, and I’ll give you credit.) I’ve been using it for a couple of months now, and it totally works. It’s clumsy, it’s inelegant, it’s a total hack… but it works. It does what I want it to. It records the time of an event in my calendar, exactly the way I tell it to — and it keeps it that way, exactly as I entered it.
The hack:
Type the start and finish time of the event into the title of the event.
When I enter an event in my calendar, in the “title” field, I’ll type, “Dinner with Rebecca,” or, “Talk at Colorado State,” or, “SFO to ORD.” And then I’ll type in, “6pm – 8pm,” or “7:30 pm – 9pm,” or “11:15 am – 5:35 pm.”
And because it’s just text in the title field, it doesn’t change, no matter where I am.
It’s clumsy. It’s inelegant. It’s a total hack. But it works.
You’re welcome.