Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood.

So here’s an alternative approach. I’m gonna show you some weird timezones. In fact, the weirdest timezones. They’re each about as weird as timezones are allowed to get in some way.
↫ Ulysse Carion

The reason why timezones are often weird is not only things like the shape of countries dictating where the actual timezones begin and end, but also because of politics. A lot of politics. The entirety of China runs on Beijing time, even though it covers five geographical timezones. Several islands in the Pacific were forced by their colonisers to run on insanely offset timezones because it made exploiting them easier. Time in Europe is political, too – countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain should really be in the same time zone as the UK, but adopted UTC+1 because it aligns better with the rest of mainland Europe.

Although anything is better than whatever the hell Dutch Time was.

Then there is, of course, daylight savings, which is a whole pointless nightmare in and of itself that should be abolished. Daylight savings rules and exceptions alone cover a ton of the oddities and difficulties with timezones, which is reason enough to get rid of it, aside from all the other possible issues, but a proposal to abolish it in the EU has sadly stalled.