They can’t all be winners, I suppose.

Ideas, that is.

Case in point, I’ve been sitting here for the last hour, trying to make something entertaining out of my recent discovery that Google Calendar supports time zones.

The key word there, of course, is “trying”.

It’s a useful feature, especially when dealing with an event that spans multiple time zones (hello, plane flight to Missouri). But entertaining? Not so much.

There’s some minor humor in the fact that the feature has been around for nearly a decade–the oldest references I can find to it date back to 2011–but I only discovered it last week. And you all trust me to be on the cutting edge. Sorry about that.

Maybe it says more about the user interface designers than it does about me. Google does have something of a fetish for hiding controls behind menus, so they can display the actual information in a sea of whitespace.

That’s a fetish they share with Apple, by the way. Which means most of the rest of the tech industry falls in line. Arguably, it’s an improvement over the previous state of affairs, where every possible control was squeezed onto the main screen, or at most, moved one menu level down.

There are still some holdouts in the old style–Microsoft’s Ribbon Bar, I’m looking at you–but I digress.

In any case, I can’t blame the UI here. There’s a prominent “Time Zone” button right next to the date and time fields on the event creation/edit page.

Clearly, there’s a lesson here about willful blindness, seeing only what we expect to see, and the triumph of imagination over reality.

Puts a whole different light on climate change deniers, Trump supporters, and anti-vaccination activists, doesn’t it? It’s not that they’re denying the evidence. They literally don’t see it, even though it’s right in front of them.

Not that that’s a legitimate excuse. The Time Zone button is right there, whether or not I saw it.

Does make me wonder what else I’m missing out on, though.