An advantage to working at a morning newspaper on the west coast of the United States:

Pretty much the whole sports day was over by the time we reached our deadline. We had complete news packages.

Not much terra firma is behind California in the time-zone map, aside from Alaska and Hawaii. So the total “day’s global news package” was complete when we went to bed.

Not so here in Abu Dhabi, in the UAE. Time breaks badly for us.

Of course, this doesn’t matter as much, in an era when many (most?) people digest their newspapers through their websites. Which are updated more frequently.

But for the print product, our time zone — three hours ahead of London, eight hours ahead of New York, 11 ahead of Los Angeles — means we often are confronted with problems of how to handle events. In North America, in particular.

Take the Masters. We had nothing at all about it for two days during the tournament. Because anything we ran would be so dated by the time the newspaper was picked up in the morning.

An 11 p.m. deadline here is only 3 p.m. in Augusta, and for the final two days we won’t have the final scores of the leaders. Which is why we twice went with nothing on the Masters rather than a story that would have been overtaken by events almost before we were out the doors of The National.

It is awkward. The NBA, the NHL, both of which have some international appear … always a day behind for our print product. The NFL is even more frustrating/worse because it happens in the day, in the U.S., and we still can’t get it in because no game ends before midnight our time. When we have already gone home.

We even have trouble getting European soccer night games into the paper. We hold the paper for an extra hour on Saturdays and Sundays to get all the Premier League scores in, for example, but if a game starts at 7 in England or 8 on the continent … we just miss it. That encompasses a lot of Champions League games.

I remember many times, in SoCal, thinking “how do those east coast guys deal with always being behind?”

Now, when it comes to sports, I wish I had New York’s immediacy problems.