There is a phrase that became a kind of shorthand during the pandemic years, when every meeting moved online and every delegation that used to fly into London started joining from a screen instead.

‘Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, whatever applies to you.’

I heard it dozens of times, opening dozens of virtual sessions between British and Latin American counterparts. Everyone laughed, every time. It became a ritual acknowledgement of the obvious: we are not in the same time.

What nobody said out loud — and what I watched cause friction in meeting after meeting — is that the time zone gap is only the surface of the problem.

The situation

Before the pandemic, the delegations I interpreted for would fly to London. They would arrive, adjust, and exist in the same space and time as their British counterparts. Eight in the morning meant eight in the morning for everyone. The shared ‘now’ was given.

When meetings moved online, the shared ‘now’ disappeared. A British official joining a call at nine in the morning is fresh, caffeinated, at the start of their working day. Their counterpart in Mexico City is joining the same call at three in the morning, or in Buenos Aires at six in the morning, or in Bogotá at four. The word ‘now’, as in ‘let’s discuss this now’, ‘we need a decision now’, ‘can you send that now’, no longer points to the same moment for everyone in the room.

Linguists call this deixis: the way words like ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘soon’, and ‘later’ only have meaning relative to the speaker’s position in time and space. When everyone is in the same room, deixis is invisible. When the room is virtual and spans five time zones, deixis starts to fail.

The friction