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Sundial | Jul 30 2003

If it would work, sure, I would change all the clocks in the world for you so that you won’t be late anymore, sure, why not? Sadly, though, I doubt this would help you. Why? Say you have a two o’clock meeting, for which you need to leave at one-thirty to be on time, but instead, for whatever reason or reasons (I don’t pretend to understand any of this), you don’t manage to leave until two o’clock, which means that you will likely arrive a half-hour late, at two-thirty, only when you arrive, the clock there miraculously says two o’clock because I previously went around and changed all the clocks in the world to read a half-hour earlier. Pretty sweet, right? Wrong. Look down at the watch on your wrist. It now says two-thirty; you believed it and that’s why you’re “on time.” But what about all your future meetings? Are you expecting me to go around and change all the clocks in the world again so that your watch is now a half-hour ahead of where it was before, which is to say a full hour ahead of all the clocks in the world, so that when you mentally subtract a half-hour from what your watch says (as you are bound to do once you discover it’s a half-hour fast), you will still have a half-hour cushion? This is asking a lot of me, to put it mildly, and anyway it won’t work. To use an analogy, imagine asking me to move an entire bowling alley every time a bowling ball leaves your hand so as to compensate for the way your shot always hooks to the left. Wait, sorry, this is a bad analogy because I think it might actually work. Which is interesting because it points to an important difference between the tendency to be late and the tendency to hook. What is that difference? I don’t know. Meanwhile I can barely type fast enough to tell you how flawed your plan is. Because for one thing, if you see any clocks on the way to your meeting, you’re screwed, because once you see one, you’ll know you have an extra half-hour and aren’t going to be late after all, and so as is your nature, you’ll spend another half-hour in transit, or however you spend it, and show up the usual half-hour late. Consequently, on top of changing all the clocks in the world every time you have to be somewhere, I would need to invent special glasses that prevent you from seeing any clocks on your way to where you need to be, or that if you do see any clocks, these special glasses would have to change the time you see by a given amount, all of which would be quite a trick for me to pull off, particularly since we’re not only talking about digital clocks and analog clocks but sundials. And even if I could pull it off, which I’m not saying I could, every time you make a plan with someone, you’ll have to also contact me and ask me to change all the clocks again and also recalibrate your special glasses (via remote control, presumably), which could quickly become tiresome for both of us, and of course I would then have to drop whatever I was doing to do this thing for you, and even if we limited it to New York or Brooklyn or even just the route between you and wherever you need to be (which means you would have to stick to that route, which I can’t imagine you would enjoy; no, you would positively hate that), that’s still a lot of clocks to change, particularly when you consider all the people on the subway who hold onto the bars above their heads in such a way that their shirts and/or jackets roll up their arms, so that you, standing to the side, inadvertently see their exposed watches. Or forget watches: What about the people who publicly answer the question of what time it is? How do we prevent you from overhearing these answers? Do I invent an ear-filter gizmo that somehow blocks out such exchanges, perhaps keying on the phrases like “What time is it?” and “Do you have the time?”? It starts getting crazy at this point, because as you know, it’s not unusual to see people ask the time by pointing at their watch-less wrists and mouthing the question. How do we screen for that? Also, to return to the example of your two o’clock meeting, it now strikes me that it’s going to be more difficult to fool you a second time than I originally thought. Specifically, once I’ve tricked you once (for it is a kind of tricking), you are bound to catch on and anticipate the amount of the next “adjustment,” an “adjustment” which you yourself will have requested. Thus it seems that I will need to always exceed your estimate of my next adjustment by precisely the amount we both anticipate you would otherwise be late. That’s a difficult sentence to read and an even more difficult thing to pull off. And anyway, we haven’t for one second discussed the ethics of selfishly messing with everyone’s clocks several times a day, which knowing you I’m sure will be a deal-breaker. And so for these and probably several other reasons I haven’t yet thought of, I believe you have no other choice than to ask someone (not me; this would be way too scary for me) to conduct surgery on the part of your brain that controls stuff like how you estimate the distance (measured in time) between where you are and where you need to be, and also the part, which I assume to be elsewhere, of how you deal with the fact (measured in anxiety) of having committed to be somewhere at a certain time, or perhaps simply the part, if such a part exists, which produces stories, each better than the last, that explain why you’re late.