Learning to Tell Time

This past Sunday, Harvard students, along with people of every race, gender, age, ideology and taste, except for a few million people in Arizona and Indiana, participated in one of our country's only universally-observed national rituals. In a phenomenon more widely recognized than Thanksgiving, the Olympics, the Superbowl or even Hanson, people all over America set their clocks one hour ahead.

I, however, did not participate in this nationwide statement of unity and progress. As a conscientious objector to national policy, I refused to set my clock one hour ahead. Instead, I set my watch 53 minutes ahead, my clock 47 minutes ahead, and my computer's clock 37 minutes ahead. You see, I had already set my clocks ahead. And therein lies my problem.

Since the last time the clocks changed, I had been living in my own personal time zone. I had noticed last semester that I was consistently arriving late to classes and meetings. Perhaps I was grossly underestimating the time required to walk from my room to Divinity Avenue. Or maybe I was relying a little too much on the general college observance that lectures do not begin until seven minutes after the hour and stretching that concept to apply to things rather outside it, like catching planes. Or perhaps I was just lazy. Regardless of the cause, however, I quickly realized the habit was worth breaking and set about to correct it the only way I knew how: by setting my watch a few minutes ahead.

Of course, I was aware that this is a relatively common ploy with low rates of success. But I intended to be the exception that proves the rule. In what I considered a particularly crafty tactic, I set my watch not to five minutes ahead--so easy to correct for the "real time"--but to the far more ambiguous seven minutes ahead. In this way, I succeeded in fooling myself to the extent that I even began showing up early. Yet there were limitations on the system. Because I rely on my clock rather than my watch while in my room, I found that I was still consistently late to morning activities. There was only one solution: set-ting my clock ahead. Since mornings were more difficult for me, I attempted to compensate for additional tardiness by setting my clock 13 minutes ahead. Once again, it worked like a charm: I managed to get front row seats in even my earliest classes. But there was still room for improvement.

After hiring several consulting companies to study my work habits, I determined that the locus of lowest efficiency in my life was my computer, where I often sit for hours pretending to write papers while actually checking e-mail repeatedly.

Using statistical analysis, I determined that I could optimize my workspace by setting my computer's clock 23 minutes ahead. And so I did.

But after a few months, it backfired. I began taking advantage of those extra seven, 13 or 23 minutes. A 12:00 lecture, for example, didn't really start until 12:13, but if you add the extra seven minutes, the class actually started at 12:20. Once I knew that I didn't really have to be anywhere until 20 minutes after my personal hour, I was setting myself up for disaster.

And when in my room, ensconced in my own time zone, I soon became completely incapable of determining the time at all. Instead of keeping me prompt, the sea of readjusted clocks began to eat away at my life: I had inadvertently created a space where the concept of time itself had been effectively destroyed. Perhaps I could have checked my roommates' clocks, but they were having similar time-related problems that made invading their rooms difficult--one was in the habit of going to bed and waking up early to take seven-hour practice MCATs, while the other slept at random hours, adding up to about six hours per day over each three-day period but otherwise conforming to no particular pattern. I found myself calling home and slyly asking my parents what time it was, but even this proved difficult, since they are in the normal-people habit of going to sleep before midnight and waking up at six to go to work. After a while, a friend directed me to The Atomic Clock, a cesium-based timekeeper maintained in a laboratory somewhere in France and used by scientists worldwide as the standard-setter for time on our planet.

The Clock's time is posted on the World Wide Web, and this Web site soon became one of my most frequent places of virtual pilgrimage. But who knew if some scientist, under the crunch of a project deadline, hadn't made a few minor adjustments?

The only way out of this disaster was to set my clocks right. So in honor of Daylight Savings Time, I did. Not only did I end up losing only 37 minutes of sleep, but I also found the delightful sense of security of knowing not just where I was and who I was, but also when I was. And I suddenly wasn't afraid of being late anymore. 15 years ago, most current college students did not know how to tell time. For some of us, unfortunately, this has not really changed in the intervening years. What seems like five minutes to me is actually more like fifteen; even when looking at a clock, I often doubt my own ability in reading it. Have I really been working for four straight hours on this paper? Or, conversely, has this incredibly boring person really only been lecturing for 17 minutes? And when I see my roommate sleeping at random hours and hear students panicking over the exact minute when an assignment is due, I sense that I am not alone in my confusion, or in my fear.

Time is not our enemy. It is a tool to set us straight, to give us a frame for our lives, to place ourselves on common footing with everyone else. The next time we look at a clock, we should remember that it isn't guard in our personal prison--it's friendly face telling us that yes, there is a standard, and no, we are not alone. As you readjust to Daylight Savings Time, remember: You're the one telling time. Don't ever let time tell you.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.