time zones

OK, so Mandy’s phone woke up early the other morning and found itself several hundred miles to the east.  Normally this is no big deal for a cell phone, because people turn them off when they fly and they wake up in Oslo or wherever and then they’re fine.

Imagine that for a second, and think about what kind of crazy your life would be like if you were a cell phone.  (You would also be incredibly dirty and close to people’s mouths all day.)

Well, what was unusual about this is that Mandy’s phone was wrong.  Mandy’s phone was with Mandy, and Mandy was (thankfully) with me, and we were all three in the same place we were the night before.  Our house.  Several hundred miles west of the wrong place that the phone thought it was in.  So the phone wakes up and is all, “hey, it’s 6am”, when it’s really five, and it’s also all, “hey, you changed time zones–want me to switch all your calendar events by one hour?”  Which is really nice and a big bonus on any phone that knows where it is with accuracy greater than the width of a largish state.

So Mandy has this phone that thinks it’s somewhere else, but it’s right there with us.  A little while later it switches back and all is well.  But what happened?  My phone retained its usual geosynchronous savvy, as did that of the other four people I know.  I’m, of course, not really sure, but I have theories:

1.  There was something that knocked a satellite out of whack by a billionth of a meter, like a big solar flare, and some beam of electromagnetic wave/particle things got slightly bent on their unbelievably fast trip between the phone and the tower, or the tower and the satellite, and I’m pretty sure it’s clear by now that I don’t know anything about physics, or how cell phones work.

2. Mandy’s friend gave her (and I am not lying) a little gold decoration plate thingy to put on the phone, and they said (I reassure you once again that I speak the truth) that the gold piece helped to absorb some of the radiation from the phone to keep her from getting the tumors.  (That really happened.  The gold plate thing, not the tumors.)  So my theory is that the gold really does have an effect, and that the effect is that it breaks the phone and makes it crazy.

3.  Maybe the phone isn’t confused about space but about time.  Maybe the phone thought that it was late spring and it had a Premature Daylight Savings Reaction (PDSR) and went one hour forward.  The thing is, as far as I know, PDSR is a non-existent phenomenon.

4.  Maybe, just maybe, the phone was right.  Maybe we were all transported to a tiny island in the Caribbean in the night, and only the phone knew, and it was trying to warn us and then the cyber-geniuses shut it down, and now they’re going to experiment on us and our phones.  I’m just having a hard time figuring out how they managed to make this place smell like Brunswick.

5.  What probably happened is that by changing the time on her phone remotely the phone company could extend her month by an hour and charge her for more minutes or something.

Anyway it got me thinking, what the heck is in the time zone to the east of us?  Bermuda, and maybe Greenland?  A pie-shaped slice of Antarctica?  So I looked it up, and apparently there’s this place called South America, like us but only in the bottom half.  Actually, I did know about South America, but I just don’t have good spatial memory and I thought the continent was a lot further left than it is.  Apparently all land masses are constantly moving anyway, so I might be right about that one day.

But weirdest of all is that there is a zone in between Eastern and the next one over.  It’s called Venezuela, which is Spanish for “temporally unconventional.”  It’s 30 minutes ahead of us, 30 behind the next one over, and undoubtedly a refuge for artists and the mentally maladjusted.

Come to think of it, I wonder why we chunk up time zones by the hour. We have the technology now to create a time zone gradient, enabling precise time readings for any location on earth.  As you move in an east-west direction the time would change constantly, instead of in bulky one-hour chunks.  That way, if you’re just one minute late for work, you can use the back door and be on time.

I have some friends on the other side of the country that I’m hoping will dig this idea.  I just hate they have to wait three hours before they can even read it.