The Week the Clocks Stop Agreeing

Twice a year, my family lives in two different time zones — no wait, we always do. What I mean is: twice a year, the distance between us changes, and nobody warned the calendar.

Here’s how it works. France turns its clocks back on Sunday, October 25. America waits a whole week and does it on November 1. So from October 25 to November 1, Paris and Los Angeles are eight hours apart instead of nine, and Paris and New York are five apart instead of six.

One hour. It sounds like nothing. It is, in fact, a small minefield.

Take the standing Sunday call with my parents in California. At 6 PM their time, it’s normally 3 AM for me — already absurd, so we do it Saturday mornings instead. During gap week, the arithmetic shifts and suddenly I’m the one doing long division in my head at the breakfast table, wondering if I should call now or wait an hour, and by the time I’ve decided, my coffee is cold.

Then there’s work. The 6 PM call from the Los Angeles office lands at 2 AM in Paris during gap week. Two in the morning. Whoever scheduled it looked at a calendar that said “same as always” and moved on. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s everybody’s problem.

My American friends in Paris have a ritual for this. We check our phones twice: once to see the time, once to remember whose time we’re looking at. There’s a particular face we all make — squinting at the lock screen, doing the subtraction with our fingers under the table at dinner. The French partners watch this with the gentle pity of people who have never had to wonder what time it is for their own mother.

The truth is, this is one of the quiet costs of living abroad that nobody puts in the brochures. Not the big homesickness stuff. The small stuff: the week your sister’s bedtime moves an hour closer and you keep calling while she’s putting the kids down. The meeting you join at what turns out to be the wrong hour, smiling too hard on camera to cover it.

Expats learn to keep two clocks in their heads anyway. We know that Lyon is nine hours ahead of San Francisco the way we know our own phone numbers. But the gap week reminds you that time zones aren’t geography. They’re politics. Some government somewhere decided when the clocks change, and two governments decided differently, and now your Tuesday is a puzzle.

My advice, from ten years of getting this wrong: for that one week, don’t do math. Just ask. “What time is it for you right now?” It’s the kindest question an expat can ask, and it works in both directions.

On November 1, America falls back and the world lines up again — nine hours, six hours, back to normal. The minefield clears. The phone calls go back to their regularly scheduled absurdity.

Until spring, when we do the whole dance in reverse. I’ll see you at the lock screen, squinting.