The Tyranny of Timezones
When we moved, I expected the distance to be the hardest thing. Not being able to get home easily or often. Losing touch with friends. I have moved often enough, and experienced enough big life changes, to know that people gradually grow apart when they don't see each other regularly. Even with effort to arrange visits, deep relationships turn into periodic shallow updates. There are no new memories, only a growing number of Skype appointments or text exchanges in which one of you asks the other what they've been up to, until someone finally calls it quits. It's like every long-distance relationship is a little universe expanding until it's stretched so thin it's meaningless. But it turns out the time is the bigger problem. Western Australia is 13 hours away from central daylight time, and 14 hours away from central standard time (on account of WA doesn't practice daylight savings time). This is annoying for business. You lose a day with every email exchange, ...