Family Skype time

This Saturday just past, Susan and I managed a four-way Skype conversation with our kids. That’s happened only a few times over the past several years; remember, we’re dealing with four different time zones and four different countries (Ireland, China, the U.S., and the People’s Republic of California). This time through, however, I used a spreadsheet to select the best likely times for us all to be available, and simply arranged it in advance, and it surprisingly required very little coordination.

As it happens, sroni’s part is usually the trickiest; China is 13 hours ahead of the Midwest/Left Coast average, so morning for us is evening for them, but Ireland splits the difference. At the time of the call, it was 5AM for Susan, 7AM for me, 8PM for Kevin, and 1PM for sroni. This is the kind of thing that seldom works itself out on its own, and — though I had drawn up the time-zone spreadsheet last year — it was the first time it had occurred to me to formally schedule a joint family call time.

What did we talk about? No big issues, it was just touching base and talking. The big thing was that it was all of us.