Windows Phone Thoughts: Hey Outlook - My Birthday Didn't Move... But Do I Get More Presents?

While traveling, I usually change the time zone on my PDA and laptop. The way Outlook normally works is to shift all of your appointments on your machine so that they still occur at the same time they did before in the time zone in which you created them. Follow me? One example of the way it works is if you have a meeting at work at 3pm, then you travel to a time zone two steps west and you teleconference for the meeting. It will look like the meeting has shifted to 1pm instead of 3pm, because that is the correct time given your current time zone. On the other hand, while you're traveling, you find out that your cousin has a soccer game at 10am the day after you return. You enter the appointment, but then after you get back it looks like it's at noon and you miss it.

There have been many arguments over whether this is the "right" way to handle time zone changes, but I've come to expect it. What I didn't expect is what I noticed today: "full day" appointments ALSO get shifted. While they look like they don't have specific start/end times, internally it seems they are stored as midnight to midnight. So when I changed my time zone two hours earlier on this trip, and looked in my calendar, I was wondering why all the birthdays and anniversaries were now spanning two days. Just for fun I also created an appointment at one time zone extreme and switched to the other time zone extreme. Sure enough, it moved days.

I'm not sure I agree with this one. On "all day" events, the specific time matters a lot less (or else I would have entered a time range!). I'm no more likely to call someone to wish them a happy birthday at 10pm or 2am than at midnight - I'm going to wait until we're both normally awake. It would be nice if there were a setting to make the day-long events immutable. Do you hear me, Microsoft? ;)