What Time is it

Mr Wolf?

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm sure it was a party game when I was younger, but really can't remember how it was  played.

Anyway, what time is it? Do you know?

Last week sometime I was having a conversation about timekeeping and how we have a slight problem with people leaving early. Later on I went out the office at 3:55pm (by my watch) to discover everything was deserted, everyone had gone home.

The following day I commented on this, and it then became apparent that the time is relative. Time is defined by clocks, and clocks go wrong. Battery clocks (most people will agree) gain or lose fairly consistently, so I'm used to working by my watch and cooker clocks along with any other mains powered clock. Well, my watch (waterproof to 100m) broke a few months back in the swimming pool, I got it going again, but I know it was reset here, how I decided what time it was I don't know. All mains clocks are equally dodgy (see The Day I Stopped Smiling).

So how else do you know what time it is? ahh, computers and the radio.

The Radio here is run by Mike. Whilst it's a perfectly entertaining commercial radio station I think they have the same slight issue with timekeeping as the rest of us. By my reckoning the 7am news (the only one I reliably hear every weekday) varies by anything up to 5min when it starts, and there certainly aren't any Pips. The internet should be reliable. But at work the IT security seems to have locked the clocks, so in one office they're all about 8minutes out, and in my office it seems to be in the region of 20seconds out. I've calculated this by looking at http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/, which I hope is accurate, but disagrees with my home computer by 3seconds...

Anyway, is the time absolute or relative? On Thursday I went to a friends house for a curry, the invite was for 5pm, I arrived as my watch said about 5:30pm, and I was not the last. The last person as my watch was saying about 7pm, but that's quite normal. 5pm, on the dot, lasted for about 2 hours.

A meeting scheduled for say 9:00, may start when my watch says 9:10, even if everyone is there by 8:50. Perhaps the answer is to specify not only the time, but the clock? This would at least be an accurate definitive system. It also resolves any problem with timekeeping at work, I'm not permitted to vary the hours we operate to be 8:25am to 3:55pm as I don't have the Authority, but I can specify which clock we use. Nobody else on the island would be likely to notice that we were running to GMT+5minutes, or Roads Time.

The only thing is that I still wouldn't have a reliable clock either in GMT or Roads Time... perhaps I should just stop wearing a watch, like many other people, and go with the flow. inevitably things will still happen, does it really matter if we don't know exactly when?