Shard

Anyone else have a "timezone issue" with FaceTime ?

Well, maybe you don't if you are in Canada calling the UK. However, from the UK to Canada I find it a bit tricky, as by the time it's morning out West it's early evening in Britain, and as the evening wears on on the, my brain starts to shut down, whereas in Canada it's midday and everyone is "full on"?

With phones it was less of an issue, as you're just speaking. One side could be slower, more tired than the other, and it didn't have much overall impact.

BristolUK

Probably better for the caller not to see you when they phone you around 6.00 am on Christmas morning.

At least they can now remember that our time is behind theirs and not the other way around.

Shard

For East Coast, that's unforgivable !

Siouxie

Trying to find a time to talk to my sister in the UK can be problematic; I work til 3am so am rarely awake til gone 10am (3pm UK) - she's out and about til around 5.30pm. I'm working again at 6pm UK time - she's getting home and getting supper ready around the same time. By the time I am ok to chat at around 7.30 UK time, she's either about to eat or if we leave it til my next 'free time', she's tired, about to watch her favourite program or getting ready for an early night as she has to go somewhere the next morning.

We end up with a quick 10 minute call, sometimes on video or else leave it to the weekend when we are both more likely to be able to spend longer on the call.

Thankfully she is very aware of the time difference, so no calls at some ungodly hour! (unlike my son, who when living in the UK frequently called me at 4am!)

Zoe Bell

I call my parents in the uk at 9:00am on a sunday morning. I'm literally just up and they seem to find the timing works

Atlantic Xpat

I have the advantage of being on 3.5hrs behind the UK. So we can facetime with family in the UK pretty much from whenever we get up to 7ish in the evening. I'm a frequently traveller to the UK for business so facetime with the wife and kids here a lot. That can be more challenging as invariably if I want to talk to them in the morning before school it's a call at 10.30am while I'm in the office. In the evenings if they call me after school I can sometimes (just sometimes) be in the pub when they call. Which goes down well when the Mrs is at home with two kids fighting and I'm in a boozer in London.

First world problem though. The ubiquity of instant, high quality, free video calling is still an amazement for those of us old enough to remember life before skype!

BristolUK

Oh yes, you're in one of those funny twilight zone thingies.

Family Favourites. BBC Radio.

Former Lancastrian

How about actually writing a letter posting it and then waiting for a reply. God how did we survive those stone age days?

BristolUK

I loved getting and writing letters. I had about 6 penfriends on the go at one time.




Email's better though.

Shard

Well,truth in that, but the video-call quality is not always as high as it could be.

BristolUK

Neither was the handwriting.

Jingsamichty

I work away a lot and I call home daily. We never, ever use Skype or Facetime, neither my wife nor I like it - we just like the phone call.

When we were first together in the mid 1990s, the internet didn't really exist, nor were mobiles as ubiquitous as they are today. We used to write real letters to each other. I was working in what was then the immediately post-Soviet Union and communication was all-nigh impossible - phone calls were about 15 minutes once a week on a Inmarsat satellite phone ($$$$!), and I'd write letters in a diary fashion; when one of my colleagues was going home after his 8 or 12 week rotation everyone would load him up with letters to post once he got to Heathrow.

Similarly, on the way back to work, the cardinal rule was to load up with newspapers and magazines at Heathrow. If you turned up back at site empty-handed, people got very angry indeed!

Amazing, this was really just over 20 years ago.

<scene fades to old man dribbling in a rocking chair...>