What the hell time is it, anyway…

        Story:  Time and its relationship to distance or length has always interested me.  When someone says “I’ll be home in five minutes” to their spouse, a question which pops to mind is ‘who's clock are they looking at?’  They both can’t be looking at the same timepiece, and unless they are, they will never be on time!  The distance the second hand moves or travels on one maker’s timepiece in one of man’s invented time periods is not the same distance on another watchmaker’s timepiece.  If Big Ben in London , England has a second hand, it would never complete its second to second movement in the same time it takes Lucy’s 1/2” dial on the Timex her mother gave her, which she hasn’t wound today.  The same could be said for digital watches.  The speed or length of a second depends on how long and wide the ‘buss’ is, or the resistance of the circuitry, and the voltage of the electricity traveling across it to light up the LED display on the dial.  A ‘buss’ being a flat wire or molten metal etched into circuit boards; furthermore, this could also be said of computers.  To say all modems run at 56 Kbps is a lie unless the ‘busses/wires’ which carry that electrical charge are identical in every way and are timed with the identical design and piece of equipment, which they are not because no two computers or circuit boards can be identical. And certainly no two watchmakers can possibly use identical parts in their watches because there is no such thing!  Therefore how long a second is depends on what mode and model of the instrument telling you a second has passed.  If I had a wire one mile long, and a wire one inch long with LED numbers at their respective terminal ends, there is no way a ‘second’ reading on either wire can be the same length of time because of the different lengths electrical charges must travel to complete the task of lighting the bulb so you can physically see one second passing on the dial.  So whose clock are we running on anyway?  When someone says ‘wait a minute’, whoa...no so fast, what kind of watch do you have on, and how long are your minutes anyway, and how old is that piece of garbage, and how long have those molecules been smashing into one another?  And besides, what kind of instrument did you use to measure your seconds?  If the timepiece is electric solar/battery, we know the watch started slowing down the minute we put a battery in it because batteries go dead.  And whose battery was that?  How long has it been sitting on a shelf?  Was my watch tested and adjusted with a new battery or an old battery or reostat that has been sitting around before it left the shop?  Basically, no one knows what the hell time it is!  Do you have the time?  Yea, but is it old time or new time?  I want fresh, new time; you know, unused time. Juicy, unadulterated time, yea, that’s what time I want! When I say ‘give me a minute’, I don’t want old time off a slow watch, I want new time that hasn’t been used for something else yet.  A guy says to his wife, ‘I’ll see you at 6 o'clock tonight’.  If his watch is slow or he is looking at a slow watch he will arrive late even if his watch says six, right?  And you stood there wasting new, unused time waiting.  And we wonder where the time goes.  We never get to use it.  If the time we are running on is 2 hours old because no two timepieces have the same length of seconds, where the hell does that leave us?  Real time has already passed.  Six p.m. on Monday, January 11, 2006 has already passed by, we just don’t know it because everything we have is slowing down and says it hasn’t happened yet.  The time we are living on is the past, but our timepieces and calendars tell us today is in the future. And how about those gears in time pieces?  It is no matter what they are made of, brass, stainless, plastic, etc., because these materials are just molecules fashioned into man made objects.  So have you ever seen a display of molecular structure?  You know the little balls in space with valences and such?  Well, what do you think happens to gears that are hitting each other in repetitive motion?  If the molecular structures that make up the fabrication of gears in watches are just molecules hitting molecules, gears hitting gears, how can the distance between the gear teeth or two molecular structures possible stay the same over time? Most watches have jewels that act as bearings for these gears to ride on or pivot on.  Jewels are used because they are harder; their molecular structure is ‘tighter’ and subject to less stresses (not none) or distortion like the molecular structure of brass gear teeth.  Regardless, the grinding of molecules on molecules cannot occur without wear or distortion of the original molecular structure.  Simply said, the molecule structures that are transferring the measurement of man’s time to you every day cannot possibly do it in a precise manner day after day.  So again I ask you, whose’ time are we talking about; yours or mine? Because if were using mine were in trouble, I threw mine out into a busy intersection and sat at a bus stand watching cars run it over while I sipped a cold beer. Remember, if you are looking at a clock, and can see time passing, it’s wrong, and I'm too late.  See you next time. RJ

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