Tuesday, 1 January 2008
Time behaves very specifically
Try as I might, I could not have flubbed last night's Happy New Year message more classically.
The New Year's hour is 12/31 @ 12:59:59. Not, 1/1 12:59:59. D'oh!
So a slightly belated Happy New Year!
“Why classically?” you ask. Well, seven, or eight, years ago I went to CA to visit my, then future, wife. I had a return ticket to GA that was a “red-eye.” Well, I didn't pay attention to the detail of hour and day. I'll make up the date and time for this recall, but let's say it read 7/4 @ 12:15 a.m. I read this, for whatever reason, as the night of 7/4. Not as: "the plane will depart in the first fifteen minutes of 7/4." This was pre-9/11 and it was much easier to switch up tickets then. The ticket agent quickly got me on the flight leaving 7/5 @ 12:15 a.m.
I seem to have precedent for this confusion. The moral of this story? Don't make plans with me that fall on the temporal divisions of night and day. I might arrive a day early or a day late.
