My Dumb Quest to Check Monterrey Time
So I had this video call scheduled with a client in Monterrey today. Woke up feeling fancy, grabbed coffee, logged into Zoom early… and crickets. No client. Panicked a bit, checked my calendar. Yup, 10 AM my time. But then it hit me – Monterrey is in a different time zone. Crap. How far off was I? No clue.
First thing I tried? The obvious. Typed “Monterrey time” into my browser like a caveman. Got flooded with results. Weather sites, travel pages, even hotel booking ads. Scrolled past three pages full of junk before spotting a tiny clock widget hidden in some tourism site sidebar. This was bullshit. Too slow, too messy.
Opened up my laptop’s world clock next. Couldn’t even find “Nuevo Leon” or “Monterrey” in the city list. Scrolled forever. Saw Moscow, Dubai, Timbuktu – but no damn Monterrey. Got frustrated and closed it. Waste of time.
Felt stuck. Remembered my phone had a clock app. Went into “World Clock,” tapped the “+” button, started typing “Monterrey”… Nothing popped up. Tried “Mexico” – showed me Mexico City instead. Same time zone? Maybe? But I wasn’t sure Monterrey matched. Didn’t wanna risk being wrong again. Nope, unreliable.
Then I had a dumb idea. If the internet wouldn’t just give me the damn time, I’d force it. Knew time zones had names like “Central Standard Time.” But which one was Monterrey? Googled “Monterrey time zone.” Found out it’s called “Central Standard Time” (CST) or “Central Daylight Time” (CDT) depending on summer. Ugh, daylight saving mess. Great.
Fired up my terminal. Not some pro programmer thing, just knew a tiny trick. Wrote this dumb command:
python -c “from datetime import datetime; import pytz; tz = *(‘America/Monterrey’); print(*(tz).strftime(‘%I:%M %p’))”
Hit Enter… and boom. There it was – the exact current time in Monterrey, staring back at me from the terminal. 9:25 AM. Way easier than fighting with websites and apps. Didn’t need fancy tools, just asked nicely and the computer answered.
Made it permanent. Tossed that mess into a bash alias called “monterrey_time”. Now I just type that in any terminal window when I need to know. Takes half a second. No ads, no scrolling, no wrong guesses.
Lesson learned? Don’t trust web searches or bloated apps for something this simple. The terminal doesn’t lie. Kept a note in my setup docs too, so next time I forget (and I will forget), I know how to fix it in seconds.
