The Time Zone Fiasco That Made Me Build My Own Schedule
I remember 2014 like it was yesterday. The football World Cup was on, and everyone was buzzing. But if you were like me, living in a totally different time zone from Brazil, you were looking at a guaranteed disaster. Every single website, every news article, every printed schedule seemed to have a different kickoff time. It was a mess.
It was never just about being an hour off; it was always some nonsense about Daylight Savings that one system recognized and another didn’t, or some site just guessing. I wanted to host a huge viewing party for the opening weekend. I mean, the full works: projector, way too much questionable snack food, fifty different kinds of cheap beer. I was pumped.
I found a schedule on what looked like a professional sports site. It looked official enough. It even had my city’s local time listed, which was great, I thought. I didn’t double-check. Why would I? These guys get paid the big bucks to get this stuff right. I printed twenty copies, handed them out to everyone, and got ready to be the host of the year.
Big mistake. Huge.
The first game was supposed to kick off at 3 PM local time for us. So, we all gathered around, snacks laid out, everyone cheering twenty minutes before the whistle. Three o’clock came and went. Nothing but pre-game fluff. Then 3:30. Then 3:45. Everyone was looking at me like I was a fool. I tried to cover, saying maybe the pre-game ceremony was just super long.
Then, my buddy, Mark, who had driven three hours to get there, checked his phone. His app, some random free thing, said the match had kicked off at 2 PM. We had missed the first half hour. The first goal had already been scored.
Man, the atmosphere dropped dead. Mark went ballistic. Rightfully so. He claimed I did it on purpose, which was nuts, but he was furious. We had a massive, embarrassing row right there in my living room, shouting over the commentator’s voice that was now just background noise. He packed up and left, slamming the door so hard one of the old picture frames fell off the wall. We didn’t talk for six months. It was a total nightmare, all because of some clown in an office who couldn’t handle a simple time zone conversion.
That night, I swore I was done relying on anyone else. I was going to do this myself. Not just for me, but for anyone who had ever been screwed over by a shoddy online schedule.
The Grunt Work: Building the One True Schedule
I went full-on savage mode. I stayed up all night, fueled by cold pizza and pure rage, and I started the practice.
- First, I chased down the source. Forget the sports blogs. I went straight to the official FIFA documents. They release the schedule with the true Brazilian local kickoff times. It’s usually buried in some godawful PDF that’s impossible to read, but I found it.
- Second, I copied it. I opened up a blank spreadsheet—not a fancy one, just a basic, ugly grid—and I painstakingly typed in every single match. Date, teams, and the official Brazilian kickoff time. It took hours because those PDFs are made to frustrate you.
- Third, I nailed the conversion. I didn’t trust those online converters. I looked up the actual time difference between Brazil’s host cities (because there were a couple of different ones, which is the whole problem!) and my exact location. I wrote down the number: plus seven hours, minus one hour for the specific city.
- Fourth, I made the calculation by hand. Seriously. I made a new column and for every single match, I manually added or subtracted the difference. If a game started at 4 PM in Rio, I typed ‘4’ into a calculator, added the time difference, and then typed the result into my spreadsheet. No formulas, no imports. I did it this way to force my brain to check every single line. I made maybe five mistakes initially, which I immediately caught because the resulting time looked nuts, and I fixed them right away.
It was the most boring, meticulous grunt work I’ve done in years, but I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. That schedule was clean, simple, and most importantly, it was locally perfect. I made a final column that just said “YOUR LOCAL TIME” and that was the only thing anyone needed to look at.
I saved the file as a super simple text document and shared it with everyone. It wasn’t flashy; it didn’t have any scores or live updates. It just had the cold, hard, correct truth about when the ball kicked off in our city.
The Aftermath and Why I Share It Today
The party went off without a hitch for the rest of the tournament. People trusted my basic, ugly list way more than any fancy website. They kept asking for updates for the knockout stage, and I provided them, doing the same painful, manual process every time, just to be sure.
I still practice this today, years later. Every time a major tournament rolls around, I don’t rely on the slick, flashy sites. I dig up the official source, manually find the time difference, and build my own stripped-down, basic schedule. Why? Because the memory of Mark’s face, and the sound of that picture frame hitting the floor, is still fresh.
I trust my own process now, and my own simple, manual calculations, more than any big media company. The lesson I learned is if you want something done right, especially when it involves time zones and watching your favorite team, you have to build the bedrock yourself. If you’re using that old 2014 schedule I put together, you know exactly where those times came from: pure, unadulterated, time-zone-induced trauma and a whole night of spreadsheet rage.