These days, you often read again that the time is being changed. With all due respect, that’s nonsense, of course. Time, after all, does what it always does: it keeps going. Its version of “always forward, never backward,” so to speak. What we do—assuming we still have analog clocks in the house—is turn the clock. And, just to clear that up right away, we set it back one hour during the night from Saturday to Sunday. Seen this way, Paulchen Panther is, of course, asking the wrong question: because “Who turned the clock back, is it really that late already?”, the correct way to put it in the fall is: “Is it really still so early?” And that’s the question that also arises for those who rely on their smartphones, smartwatches, computers, or radio-controlled alarm clocks to get their time settings from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig, which in turn uses an atomic clock for such purposes.
Of course, time is relative anyway. A great example of this isn’t found in reading Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity (too difficult for us ordinary folks anyway), but rather in our daily use of public transportation. For the sake of readability, I’ll focus here on buses, but I mean this in a gender-neutral sense—so I’m including trains, ferries, cable cars, and other scheduled modes of transportation. With buses (B, F, S), here’s how it works: If you walk to the bus stop and arrive on time, but the bus happens to be early this time, you’ll end up being late. I call this the Special Stipriaan Theory of Relativity (SSR). As long as this happens during the day and with reasonable service intervals, it’s not a problem. But in the evening hours, with their sparser service, this can be very frustrating. The only solution is to arrive well before the bus does!
If the bus—which, of course, happens more often during the day—arrives later, there’s usually an explanation. A bus is just another road user and gets stuck in traffic along with the rest of them. Sometimes the delay—combined with the traveler arriving on time—is even advantageous. Because of the SSR, from the traveler’s perspective, a bus that’s actually late—but only by an unreasonably long delay within the ten-minute interval—actually arrives early—and so you end up catching a connection you hadn’t actually expected when transferring. So, in the end, you arrive at your destination too early—because of a delay. What a crazy world.
I got to experience just how relative everything is during my time working as a bookmaker (not at a betting shop, but in prepress for publications). Of course, there are schedules, which are usually worked backward—because there’s typically a fixed event (a conference, a trade show, something like that). Before that comes printing, before that comes design, and before that comes editorial work. It all starts with the authors, and they are given a deadline. What we regularly observe, however, amounts to a very unique interpretation of generally accepted workflows. So it happens regularly that someone asks, two months after their deadline, when it was. Supposedly, reminder emails never reached them, of course, and—due to vacation!—they won’t be able to get back to it for another three weeks. Even though everything should actually (actually!) already be at the printer’s by now…
A whole other chapter—and as a writer, you’re naturally treading on very thin ice here—is, once again, women. A non-scientific survey of ten women revealed: they like to set their clocks ahead—to be on time. All my attempts to understand this failed. The women surveyed usually walked away with a shrug, muttering something like, “Typical man!”
