Calendar confusion

Yesterday I sent out an email invitation to a number of international colleagues asking them to participate in a conference call next week. One of the cool things about Outlook is that when you send out a meeting request like that, the meeting automatically pops up on that person's calendar at their local time (assuming they have the local time set correctly on their computer).

So there is no guessing like, "Hm. This says 8:00 a.m., but it was sent by someone in Utah, so I need to add two hours since I'm in New York." No, Outlook does that for you. Apparently, though, no one knows this. I purposely didn't refer to the time in the body of the email since that would have been confusing and contradicted the local time. Nonetheless, I would say half of the recipients of my invitation responded to ask me if the time as it appeared in their calendar was local time or my time.

I found this incredibly puzzling. On almost a daily basis, I have to talk to someone, for some reason, in a different time zone. So I long ago figured this out. One of the people asking this question was in Canada. How is it possible to work in Canada for 12+ years and not ever have to have a business meeting that crossed time zones? So strange. And annoying -- I finally created a copy and paste email (a little terse, I admit) that addresses this issue. Argh.