Posts Tagged ‘hurricanes’

My biggest hassle after spending a week without power — thanks to our recent hurricane funfest — was not cleaning out the exciting new growths in the refrigerator or washing a cubic ton of laundry, although those were fascinating challenges that will probably come out in therapy one day.

My biggest hassle was getting my clocks right again.

I'm sure that most people, when confronted with clocks in several rooms, would simply set them to the same time and consider it a job well done. Ha, ha! What those poor, misguided people don't realize is that time is relative, as Famous Smart Guy Albert Einstein proved, and I don't get along with all of my relatives. Such consistency would completely ruin my schedule and make me horribly late for work. Or, worse, horribly early.

The timepieces in my life are meticulously calibrated. They're wrong, but they're meticulously wrong.

First we have my alarm clock, which runs about 17 minutes fast. This is necessary to trick my slumbering mind into thinking I'm already late, thus providing the vital burst of adrenaline-soaked panic I need to stop hitting the snooze button and become, somehow, vertical. The number of minutes is important because it can't be a figure my dream-encrusted mind can easily cipher, which is just about any figure.

Next we have the time on my computer I see when I check my e-mail, which I do compulsively whenever I get within a city block of my computer. This is fairly close to Real TimeTM and lets me know more or less how I'm doing, which allows me to relax and read comfortably until I need to move on.

When I get up I glance at the dining room clock, which runs fast and tells me I've somehow lost ten minutes since I turned around, so I scream and start running up the stairs. This is my cardio workout for the day.

Now, the important thing to remember is that even though I know, intellectually, that this clock is fast and I'm not really late, I still react as if I was. This is because the parts of my brain that handle the Getting to Work tasks are just above the Need Food arrays and right behind the Trees Are Pretty node. Millions of years ago primitive men got to work on time the exact same way, holding their sundials cockeyed and setting their crops forward.

Once I emerge from the shower my eyes are immediately drawn to the bathroom clock which is only a few minutes fast so I can calm down again and shave safely.

I scream again when I see my alarm clock (17 minutes ahead, remember?) and choose my clothes for the day based solely on their proximity to the door. I then hurl myself downstairs, throwing on my clothes in mid-air, certain that today is the day I'll be fired for tardiness and forced to work someplace that uses (shudder) a timeclock. By closing my eyes and running with my arms in front of me I can ignore the dining room clock, which isn't as fast as my alarm clock but faster than Real TimeTM and would, at this point, only cause confusion. Instead I sprint, after several painful attempts, into the kitchen where the times on the microwave and oven are hours apart and may even be in different years.

After a leisurely breakfast the dining room clock informs me I'm suddenly hideously late, again, and I dash out to the car where I have never set the clock on my radio and can therefore slump in blissful chronological ignorance while I drive.

There are various large digital clocks on the way to work, at banks and car dealerships and such, but none of them seem to be remotely close to any time I've ever heard of and can therefore be appreciated as art.

It's not until I get near work that I start obsessing on how late I am by pulling out my cell phone over and over and trying to remember how the Time According to Sprint relates to the time at work. Will I be a few minutes late, which is unremarkable and easily laughed away, or will I be late enough to need a saved-a-handicapped-baby-from-a-boat-fire excuse again? This is harder than it sounds since I have to dodge all the other drivers on the road who are also looking at their watches and concocting wild stories about international spies and spontaneous human combustion. And thus begins my day.

I don't wear a watch. Too stressful.