[ghaff]

It's very common for conferences and the like to use shorthand like PT or ET. The reality is that once you start specifying standard time or daylight savings time, the people writing the announcement regularly mess up. I don't remember what the house style was at my prior company but I regularly saw people putting EST or EDT at times of the year when it wasn't correct.

[bombcar]

This sounds like a classic case of engineers trying to overspecify and demand that things fit their nice little database, reality and life isn’t like that.

“PT” is more correct than many other things you could list, because people always forget which is DST and which is Standard.

It’d probably be cleaner to say that Pacific is on Mountain Time half the year.

[ghaff]

Funnily enough, I just got a bunch of one hour computer schedule changes for a European event in late March. I assume this is related to Daylight Savings vs. Standard Time. I'm sure I'll work it out once I'm over there.

[bombcar]

The additional complication is that the US and Europe switch on different dates, so they’re “out of sync” one way or another.

[ghaff]

Totally. You have the local time at the time of the event, you have current US time, and you have current European time. Yes, computers can handle a lot of this but a lot of people are working off the local times for the event--and I've had a ton of schedule corrections that I've had to confirm.