Yesterday, I went through a stressful situation that happens so frequently that I didn’t notice how irritant it was until much later, and it took me another couple other hours to realized that the incident could have been avoided. It went something like this:

1:20 PM, 40 minutes to my yearly evalution at McDonalds, which happends to take place somewhere roughly 30 minutes away from my place. No stress, I’m posting on some forums and chilling. My dad, aka lift, is trying to clean up the workspace next to my desk. I tell him to get ready, 10 minutes to liftoff, and continue browsing till 1:30. I tell dad to get ready, he responds by informing me that he still has 5 minutes left on his watch. I go upstairs for a glass of orange juice, I look at the microwave for the time, it reads 1:36. I look at my cell, it reads 1: 31. I give another holler to dad, take another glass, and by the time we’re in the car, it’s 1:43 on the car radio, but 1:37 on my cell; either way, I’m sure I’m gonna be late. I arrive at my workplace at 2:04 cell time, only to find out that the time given by the restaurant’s central system is 1:58.

You can call me a moron for stressing about being 4 minutes late, but behind the story, there’s a point. In this world people call frantic, restless, and where every second counts, why can’t we get accurate time reading EVERYWHERE? Until all time telling devices are equipped with atomic precision and automatic daily wireless updating, people need to act.

Wouldn’t it be cool if every first Monday of May, we’d all gather around one of many giant public OLED clocks and sync our watches to THE correct time? Better yet, and less costly, what if everybody took advantage of switch to or from DST to syncronize with an internet timeserver? Any of the latter would make people in general much more punctual, and probably less stressful too.

Just a thought… In the meantime, I encourage you to sync your own time at least twice a year, and invite your friends and relatives to do the same thing. If the world can pass around with mouth to mouth, maybe we can go somewhere with this.