In the Zone

Never fear, today's topic is not anything sports-related (as if!); rather, we are going to take a look at:

TIME ZONES (learn 'em, people!)

Once upon a time, life was simple. You lived in the same time zone with everyone you would ever think of phoning, or - worst-case scenario - you had a rougue cousin or second-best-friend who had moved to some godforsaken planet like Alabama, one time zone to the west. No big thing; what's an hour, give or take?

And then one day, you hopped on a plane and flew halfway around the world, racking up some serious time difference. You started having to calculate: noon minus 6 hours is ... uh, 6 a.m. Is that too early to call my folks/my boyfriend/my bank? Your parents, never having mastered basic math, decided never to call you again (hey! a fringe benefit!) but to have you call them instead (oh great, so now I have to ruin my Sunday afternoons by hanging around the house 'til 2 p.m...). The occasional inebriated friend from back home would call at midnight his time (6 a.m. for your pasty white Francophile asterisk) to tell you how he was loving life and especially the white-hot chick passed out next to him (me, I just love sleep; I suppose it's my masochistic side, since the Fates long ago decided I would never get enough of it).

Flash forward a few years and a few time zones. Now you are in a wonderful land that knows no daylight savings time (no springing forward, no falling back, just sunset at 5 p.m. in winter and sunrise at 5 a.m. in summer), in the world's number one time zone. You are 13 hours ahead of the folks back home (14 in winter); 7 hours ahead of your in-laws (8 in winter). Phoning home would have become problematic, were you not ALWAYS awake at 6:30 a.m. (Children, be it said in passing, have their own private time zones to which we adults are not privy. What on earth could possibly be the advantage of waking before sunrise, especially on weekends? Is this really a good idea for the continued propagation of the species?)

To make things even more confusing for your befuddled in-laws, your sister-in-law is in the US at this time, so while you are x +7 (or 8), she is x - 6. You probably see where this is headed, but let me tell you, even when you see the 2" x 4" coming at you, it still hurts when it hits you. Yep, mom-in-law misdials and calls at 4 a.m. I don't care what kind of lifestyle you have, when the phone rings at 4 a.m., it's never a good thing from any perspective. Luckily for the offending party, a well-placed invective never killed anyone, and more lethal forms of address require physical proximity.

Strike 1...

A couple of weeks later, it happens again. This time, the culprit is your beloved younger brother, whose speed dial should be disabled until he learns how to perform basic addition problems. (What do they teach them in MBA programs, and is that what happened at Arthur Andersen?) He rings in at 1 a.m. to ask for help with his CV (Hey, dude. Rule number 1: Never call anyone at this hour. Even family. Don't make me passive-aggressively turn your cover letter into a tangle of homosexual innuendo and bad grammar...).

A word to the wise: unplug your phone at night, and turn off the cell. And for all those well-meaning friends and family members with no grasp of time, try grandma's little trick: Buy a clock (digital, preferably with militray time or at the very least a big P for p.m.) and set it to the time where your loved one lives. Place a little placard or sticker with the loved one's name on/above the clock. Repeat as necessary. Et voila! Grandma has never called at an inappropriate time. She is in the Zone...

Just an afterthought:You're travelling to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound... but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land, whose boundaries are only that of the imagination... you're entering... the Twilight Zone... Do you have any idea what freaking time it is??

And whilw we're at it, homage to today's film-o'the-day, Groundhog Day, which is oddly appropriate to this post.