Does Time Stumble When It Marches On?

By: Knight Pierce Hirst

Time flys - even when you're not having fun. Everyone talks about it, but talking is all we do. According to the Oxford Dictionary, talking about time has made it the most frequently used noun in the English language. Year is the third most frequently used noun, day is the fifth and week is the seventeenth. On the list of the one hundred most frequently used nouns, war is forty-ninth, but peace didn't make the list - which is something we could talk about.

We could talk about timepieces/watches. Watches come in all shapes and sizes and with a variety of features. Seiko makes a watch that has a rotating globe as its dial and the globe makes a full rotation every hour. Girard Perragaur makes a watch with a built-in slot machine. This $18,000 timepiece even has a tiny gong to create a mini casino atmosphere. Then there's the watch designed by Martin Frey. It has a GPS mechanism to show you where you are. It also tells you when and where your next appointment is and when you should leave. These watches make me think that some watchmakers have too much time on their hands.

Daylight Saving Time was Benjamin Franklin's idea. Although DST was used in parts of Europe in 1916, the U.S. didn't start its off-and-on observance of it until 1918. Now we spring ahead and fall back every year - unless we live in Arizona or Hawaii, where they don't fool with Mother Nature. Congress, of course, can't resist fooling with it and has repeatedly changed the dates DST is observed. Because I had no idea my new alarm clock automatically observed DST, I got up an hour early - which fooled with this mother's nature.

Obviously, I need help with time management. Supposed experts write books about it, lecture about it and give classes on how to do it. They tell you about activity logs, prioritized to-do lists and goal setting. What they don't tell you is that you can't manage something you can't change. What they should talk about is behavior management - it's timeless.

When people talk, they often say "just a second" - but they don't mean it. When they say "just a minute", they're sixty times more likely to be accurate; but what they're really saying is that they want us to wait while they do something more important. Saying that, however, wouldn't be timely.

KNIGHT PIERCE HIRST takes humorous looks at life. Take a minute to make yourself smile at knightwatch.typepad.com

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