Time Flies
Samoa skipped Friday 30 December 2011, going straight from Thursday the 29th to Saturday the 31st, thereby leaping across the dateline to become the first country to celebrate the start of 2012. A nice change for these Pacific islands, which had been last to ring in the new year since 1892, when an American trader convinced the Samoan government to align their time zone with California.
This kind of news makes me inexplicably happy. Maybe because it is a reminder that our calendars and clocks are based on conventions that were decided upon long, long ago to chop the movement of our turning planet into manageable chunks, which could then be used to set totally unmanageable schedules and bizarre deadlines.
As a child, I remember wondering who had decided that a second should last exactly a second. Why wasn’t it longer or shorter? Why was a minute divided into 60 seconds and not 100? Why were there 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day? Why did time seem to drag when you were lying in the dentist’s chair and accelerate to rocket speed on weekends? Most of these thoughts occurred to me at school on Tuesdays, which seemed to get longer and longer the more often I glanced at the clock.
Later, my time-induced paranoia led to an embarrassing incident when I moved to Amsterdam and experienced daylight saving for the first time. “They’re deducting an hour from our day!” I moaned to my Dutch friends. “In 24 years’ time, they will have deducted an entire day from our lives!” Fortunately, my friends were already accustomed to treating me like a small child who needed to have the obvious explained to him. “You do realise that they add the hour back on in winter?” they asked after spending several very long minutes rolling on the floor with laughter.
More recently, I experienced jetlag for the first time when I flew to Chicago with my wife. I was amazed to discover just how tenaciously my body clung to the rhythm of day and night it was accustomed to. And how easily it slipped back into Amsterdam time when I returned home after three days. It gave me a taste of the disorientation my wife goes through when she jets back and forth from Amsterdam to Toronto, Delhi, Lima and Curaçao during the course of a single month. This disorientation also offers a plausible explanation for my wife’s uncanny ability to cope with the utter chaos that sometimes prevails in our household…
Before I get myself into trouble, let me return to my inexplicable happiness about Samoa’s leap into 2012. While I was seeking answers to my many questions, I discovered an interesting site that keeps track of (proposed) changes in time zones, daylight saving and other conventions relating to time and date. I was astounded to see just how often countries choose to implement changes and why they choose to do so. Did you know, for instance, that Venezuela permanently turned its clocks back half an hour in December 2007 (creating their own time zone), and that the United Kingdom has plans to switch from Greenwich Mean Time to Central European Time (+1 hour) for a three-year trial period?
That said, I’d love to hear from readers who have anecdotes about having to adjust to the different perceptions and conventions of time in other cultures. To what extent do these vary? And do schoolchildren everywhere believe that Tuesday afternoon lasts twice as long as any other afternoon?
Richard de Nooy
