WEEKLY WHINE

Temporal restrictions and you

For users of Windows 95, which currently accounts for approximately 75% of the free world [the other 25% don't have PCs], take a glance at the lower right of your monitor, where, unless you've turned it off or moved the taskbar to some other side of your screen, you'll see the clock. For most of us, the clock governs billions of aspects of our everyday lives, like when we get up, when we eat, when we go to work, class, or whatever, when we go to happy events, when we sleep, when we do other stuff, and when we meet other people. Time is not the most important commodity, and it sure don't heal all wounds, but it has a pretty darn high priority.

We always have to quantify time. When we do work, sometimes people want us to spend a certain quantity of time doing it. Such as the forty-hour work week, not always related to the amount of work, but more closely linked to speed, or lack thereof, of work. In some cases, we can get it done faster, which just means we get more to do. But usually there's minimum quantities involved to make sure that it's not too slow.

And of course, synchronization is always a problem. When we connect to other people, we have to be sure that they'll be available at that time, most importantly when time zones factor into the picture - the big difficulty, knowing that the victim will, say, be awake. But even within fifteen degrees of longitude, other factors still come into play, such as what that person is doing, whether they're at home, at work, on the links, in the gym, playing SnakeBall, or whatever the case may be. In my case, it's a lot of the last one.

But when we come down to time, one of the most important non-happy things we have about it is that there's too much of it when we don't need it, and not enough when we do need it. You know the drill, when it's boring it gets lots of time to be boring, and when it's not, it stops being not boring before anybody even notices that it was not boring. And of course, 24 hours is not enough to finish a day. I for one have lots of stuff to do every day, including Saturdays, when I have to make new picks, do miscellaneous work, complete various things, find something to Whine about, and prepare for the upcoming week. That leaves little time for sleep, which should be a third of the average humanoid's day, but in many cases, it's less. In the morning, various extenuating circumstances require that I awaken earlier than would normally make sense, after various other extenuating circumstances require that I deactivate later than would normally make sense, adding up to a non-good system. The bottom line here is that people are always going to try to fill each other's time, no matter how much of it there is. That means that it's not going to help if Congress doubles the length of a day or something - they'll just have double the work. Plus there's this thing about Earth rotating.