How to set Time Zone for Trash Day Skill

Use the following list of time zone names to tell Trash Day your time zone. For example:

     Alexa, tell Trash Day, to set time zone to <Time_Zone_Name>

For the continental United States, there are four easily-spoken time zone names (Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific). However, the Trash Day skill understands approximately six hundred other time zone names. This complete list is given in the table at the end of this page.

"Alexa-Speak"

Most of the time zone names include numbers, special characters ("/", "+", "-", "_"), common abbreviations ("Etc", "St", "US"), and computing-specific terms ("SystemV"). To say these time zone names to Alexa, you will need to state them so that Alexa can understand them. I call this "Alexa-Speak" and the translation for every time zone is given in the table as well.

NOTE: I apologize if your time zone is one of the "unpronouncable" city names. Alexa does not do well with these as regular translations and I have not yet managed to integrate the Trash Day skill with Amazon's city name database for Alexa input. If you have a case where your time zone name is just not understood clearly by Alexa, please use one of the "Etc/GMT" time zone names in the list.

Why does Trash Day need my time zone?

Amazon treats a user's time zone information as "Personally Identifiable Information." Therefore, they do not make that information available to 3rd-party custom skills like Trash Day. So when Alexa sends your request to Trash Day, the request time stamp is in GMT time zone.

This is a problem because, for example,

• you live in the US/Pacific time zone (eight hours earlier than GMT)
• you have trash pickups on Monday & Thursday at 8 AM
• and, on Sunday 7pm, you say "Alexa, ask Trash Day, when is my next trash pickup"

In this case, you would expect Trash Day to tell you "Next trash pickup is tomorrow at 8am" but the request Trash Day gets is in GMT. So Sunday 7pm Pacific time comes to Trash Day as Monday 3am GMT. If Trash Day relied on GMT, it would think it is already Monday and would tell you "Next trash pickup is today at 8am." Telling you at 7pm that your trash pickup was this morning at 8am when you're asking for the next trash pickup is very wrong.

I hope Amazon will eventually find a better way to provide time zone information to 3rd-party skills. Even just something that required a user to allow access to the time zone set in the Alexa app or at least a common time zone database like they provide for city names would help. However, until they change their policy, Trash Day gathers this information from every user and stores it with their schedule.

Full Time Zone List

NOTE: Abbreviations like "ACT" need to be stated as the individual letters. So, "A.C.T." is stated as "ay cee tee" to Alexa, but I've just shown "A.C.T." in the table for clarity.