Calendar: availability, drafts, and timezones

A calendar connector has the same shape as mail — read narrowly, draft, let a human commit — with one extra hazard that is entirely its own: time is harder than it looks, and a confidently wrong meeting time wastes other people's morning.

Ask for availability in a bounded date range with an explicit timezone, and verify the shortlist against the calendar yourself. "Find me some time next week" leaves both the range and the timezone to be guessed.

Then draft the whole event without creating it: title, start and end with timezone, attendees, location, agenda. Reviewing a complete preview is quick; discovering a mistake after twelve people received an invite is not. Creating an event sends invitations — that's the irreversible act, and it belongs to you.

Daylight saving is the classic failure. The US and Europe change clocks on different dates, so for a couple of weeks each spring and autumn the offset between London and New York is not what either party assumes. Any meeting that crosses a DST boundary needs both local times verified against an authoritative source — not derived by arithmetic in a conversation, where an off-by-one-hour error reads as perfectly plausible.

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