It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean Christmas, although it is upon us, I mean when we are three hours ahead of the United Kingdom because they have just put their clocks back.
Two hours is bad enough but three hours is a real problem. The reason, television.
When we want to watch the early evening news at 6pm in the UK it is now on at 9pm here so for us it is late evening news.
It is the entertainment programmes though that are the real problem. Strictly Come Dancing now does not begin until 10pm and goes on till after 11pm and that is normally past bedtime.
When we lived in the UK we started work at 9am, so we did not need to wake until around 7am which meant that we regularly stayed up the previous evening until gone midnight.
Here in Bahrain we start work at 7am and so have to be tucked up before 11pm.
Now if you are in the UK and cannot watch a programme at a certain time you can just go to the TV website and watch it on demand.
Unfortunately these websites are only available to people who actually live in the UK and not us.
They have even got clever with VPN’s and stopped access through them as well.
Which leads me on to how we have so massively advanced in our use of technology that we have totally lost the ability to record TV programmes on our VHS machines so that we could watch them later.
Would you know how to record a programme now?
No, neither do I, and as someone who has been programming computers for close on 40 years, I am supposed to be knowledgeable about these things.
When we are home from work and sitting down to eat dinner, we are now watching afternoon telly. Yes I know we shouldn’t be watching while eating, but the children have gone and it’s the butlers night off so we won’t tell if you don’t. Anyway afternoon telly has its own set of adverts. Obviously the only people watching TV in the afternoon are the elderly because all the adverts are for home equity release schemes or funeral plans. It is hilarious watching these sprightly geriatrics all having a great time planning their own funerals.
It’s a bit surreal.
The other issue with the time difference is that no one in the UK is in the office until after midnight here and that is more than halfway through our day.
When I worked for the Bahrain government a few years ago we finished at 2pm, so we only had two hours of interaction time with support and service centres. It was quite unproductive.
If you are actually in the UK you need to change all your clocks, some are easy, but it’s the one in the car I can never figure out. So as I have just parked my UK car and won’t be using it for the next three months I won’t bother.
It’ll be right again at the end of March.