Chavez decided to change the country's time zone to GMT -4:30. Only one other time zone which sits on a half-hour offset exists in the Western Hemisphere: Newfoundland, and not even the Western half of the province uses it. It also happens to be UTC-3:30 and so won't help Venezuela.

Venezuela has moved to a new time zone. Unable to add new timezone.

Yeah, we know. Please see Knowledge Base Notice 12-A44, "March 2007 Changes to Daylight Saving Time". It explains how to make changes to time zones and is applicable to this situation with the new Venezuela change. Enjoy. Love, REC.

And that should've been the end of it, but noooooooooooooooo. It never is.

Pls provide the patch. As I understand data import patch is available with $YourBigApp for the same.

Your understanding is as poor about a patch as it is about the language you're trying to employ. There ain't no patch. We have to do this the hard way:

Dear Rama,

To which patch are you referring? As I've already written, Notice 12-A44 explains how to change start and end times and offsets within the application under Data Admin: > Internationalization > Time Zone Admin. It is impossible to add additional time zones in $OurBigApp. You will therefore either have to change all non-Venezuelan time zones to something other than "Caracas/La Paz" ("Santiago", perhaps) or re-purpose a different time zone such as "Manaus" or "Atlantic (Canada)".

Love,
REC

Done, or so I thought.

U must provide the patch! The same patch for US time can be be modified to use existing patch with different data.

Uhh... no, Beavis. It cannot be modified. It won't work. There is no fix other than the one I told you about.

A little voice tells me this problem seems a bit more familiar than I realise.

<clicky clicky> Uh-huh. Rama. <clicky> who asked this same shit 19 months ago when the US time zones changed. I bet <clicky clicky tap tap tap> yep, and also a couple years ago for the Australian changes. It's not someone using Rama's account; her unique writing style guarantees this.

The next day I received a flurry of mail from the TAR begging me for some help. The TAR doesn't know squat and Rama is persistent, asking one stupid question after another which the TAR can't answer, so I reluctantly agreed to join a conf call and put this issue to rest. With prejudice.

I got in this morning to see a conference invitation from the TAR and an answer from Rama:

Venezuela Time Zone Discussion
Sent: 27. August 2008

Proposed By: A. Beng
When: Thursday, August 28, 2008

##

From: Rama
Sent: 27. August 2008

I am out of office on Tuesday, can u pls move it to someother date ?

Sums it up, really. A feeling not entirely unlike "calm" washes over me because it will be Beng talking to that fuckwit Rama and not me.