Our collective calendars are extensive. Elaine has her personal calendars, Mike has his and then there’s a whole range of shared calendars.
Many of these calendars contain appointments that will be repeated. Sadly not on a predictable schedule so the easiest way to set up the next one is to copy and paste the previous appointment to a new date and time.
All was well when we were using iCal but new and shiny called and we decamped to BusyCal. BusyCal was a much more feature rich application than iCal and met all our needs.
You know there’s a but coming don’t you! Working perfectly for the majority of the year BusyCal had one problem when the UK changed their clocks for daylight saving on a different date than other countries. That was when the seemingly simple task of copy and paste an appointment from one date and time to another wreaked havoc. The pasted event had an incorrect time, offset by an hour from when it should have been.
The number of appointments that needed to be manually triaged meant our calendaring time during these misaligned weeks was exponentially longer.
Hence was born “Do not copy and paste week” as it was actually faster and less error prone to manually create all the appointments in that timeframe rather than copy and paste previous events as usual.
Obviously, we contacted the developers but the reply was to the effect they could do nothing without a complete rewrite of the application … which wasn’t happening any time soon 🙄
Eventually we moved our iCloud based calendars to Google and moved away from BusyCal completely after another unacceptable run in with BusyMac support.
However, to this day that time of year when the UK is out of sync with the rest of the world in terms of daylight saving time is still referred to as “Do not copy and paste week” irrespective of the fact that on occasions it’s as long as three weeks!
NOTE: Since our initial struggles with this, BusyCal have rewritten their entire calendar handling system and it does now correctly handle such events.
