My husband spent a year TDY at Fort Benning, GA, which is right on the border of GA and AL. GA is Eastern time and AL is Central time. His apartment was in AL, but his office was in GA. He just stayed on Eastern time the whole year he was there.
I live not far from Columbus, GA. A very small portion of Alabama (where I live) is on Eastern time. I live in the Beulah area (not really a town, more like a community) which is only 15 miles or so from Columbus. Valley, AL, and Lanett, AL which is not far from us in the other direction, live on Eastern as well, and the rest of the state is on Central. In Beulah, though, lots of people live on what they like, so you never know! For instance, my daycare for youngest DD is on Eastern time, and my 5yo DD's elementary school is on Central time. They are like 3 miles apart! Try that out for size
We keep our clocks set on Eastern time, because we prefer it (shows we like to watch at night start at 8, the kids bedtime, rather than 7; we can get up at 6 AM our time and still make it to school/work at 7:30 central time, etc.) but it was confusing at first. I'm very used to it now, after 6 years. I work in Opelika, which is on central time. My office is about 10 minutes from my house. We have a GA office that's about 40 minutes away that's on Eastern of course. That took some getting used to for a lot of the people who live in Opelika and don't normally deal with Eastern time.
My parents and a lot of my friends live in Opelika/Auburn which is on central time. None of them are more than half an hour from me.
Oh, and we call it "fast time" (Eastern) or "slow time" (Central). hehe.
Here is one for a laugh, though--I've always lived in this area, but I grew up in Opelika, on central time. It wasn't until I married that I started living on Eastern, but I knew about the different time zones being so close together here. When TV shows come on here they say "coming on at 8/7 Central" or whatever the time may be. DD5 will tell us that when there is something coming on that she wants to watch, and one day I said to my DH, "isn't it funny how she says that, and she knows that we live near two time zones just because of TV shows." or something like that. He looked at me like I was crazy and said "they do that everywhere". (he's from west AL, where they only had the Central time zone.)