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So yesterday, my 5pm virtual conference is a no-show. No-shows for student conferences are sadly common, but this particular student has been punctual as a clock all semester; something's weird.
For this last round of conferences, with scheduling very tight, I'd just put all non-emergency meetings with my consulting clients on hold for the week, shared my booking link with my students (it doesn't charge you to book; by the time clients get that link, they've already paid), and told the young'uns to feel free to grab any open slot that worked for them.
This has worked out so well that I'll probably do it again, but there's one caveat: The confirmation emails are automatically generated from Google's calendar system, and sometimes they go to spam. I figured maybe this had happened to my mysterious no-show, so about 8 minutes into what should have been our appointment I sent him an email saying so and giving him the video chat link directly.
Crickets. I shrugged and went back to grading.
This morning I got an email from the same student –– not really huffy, more like vaguely aggrieved that I would think he blew off a meeting. He attached a screenshot of his confirmation email (which did arrive, so yay!) as evidence that he had actually signed up for 3pm, not 5.
Except ... the confirmation email read "3-3:30pm (PDT)."
No blame to the student; it could have happened to anybody, all too easily.
But that's kind of my point. Or, as my friend Jim likes to say:
"I love computers! They get me behind so much faster!"
Well ... yeah.
How many of us really check out the EDT or PDT at the end?
I wonder if he was using a VPN/got mis-located by Google/etc. I imagine that if Google'd had the correct location, they would've used the local time zone by default.
Then again, maybe they were too busy trying to figure out which products to advertise to him. There are reasons I prefer Safari for most browsing.