I personally find timezones more annoying. At least with encoding once you figure things out it will work indefinitely. Timezones can simply change from under you with or without notice.

> right after encoding

No joke. Today I ended up writing a whole essay explaining the issue I was having and almost sending it off to the core developers because I thought I had discovered an issue with the actual language. The bug was because I had forgot to convert too&from utf-8 in these two procedures:

    proc 2Hex { input } { binary encode hex [encoding convertto utf-8 "$input"] }
    ;# Converts base32 string data to base16

    proc 2Base { input } { encoding convertfrom utf-8 [binary decode hex "$input"] } 
    ;# Converts string hex data to base32

On the plus side, I now have written documentation of the internals of my program.