In 1981, my Grade 3 teacher Mr. McAuliffe told us that
time had gone decimal and my world caved in. After all the years of struggle,
all the years living in a maze of ‘half pasts’ and ‘quarter
tos’ and ‘something o’clocks’, I was finally getting
somewhere. Then suddenly, we were back to square one. According to Mr.
McAuliffe, the government had decided overnight that there should be 10
hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Mr. McAuliffe assured us.
‘Just remember seconds now go past a fraction quicker than they
used to.’
Pandemonium erupted in the classroom. Ashley Leckie was worried that
he was now going to die young; Millie McLeish about whether she could
watch more or less television; Clever Ian Wilson wanted to know about
light years. But the vast majority of us were concerned about one issue
and one issue alone. What did this mean for our watches? For God’s
sake don’t let anything happen to our glorious, status bringing
watches.
‘Those of you with digital watches might as well throw them away,’
Mr McAuliffe said.
It is a credit to Mr. McAuliffe’s resilience as a practical joker
that half a classroom full of bawling digital watch owners did not weaken
his performance. For two solid (non-decimal) hours we completed worksheets,
converting time back and forth. Not even Ian Wilson (with his elongated
forehead and fifty buck vocabulary) could do the sort of maths the task
demanded, but that didn’t worry Mr. McAuliffe. He just ticked everything.
Finally at, 5 noon, he came clean. ‘I should tell you all that
the time is now 12 o’clock, just as it was this time yesterday.
The only difference is that today’s April Fools’ Day.’
Nineteen years later, Mr. AcAuliffe’s decimal time idea is alive
and well and can’t be a joke because it’s been developed by
the Swiss. Yes, Swatch have figured that a good way to set the standard
in telling the time is to invent the rules by which you do it, and so
have come up with the Swatch beat. A single Swatch beat takes 1 minute
26.4 seconds of traditional time (1 minute 30 if you’re using a
Swatch that’s more than a year old) and there are 1000 beats a day.
The meridian, rather than being in Greenwich, runs straight through the
Swatch factory in Biel, Switzerland. So at midday in Biel, the time is
@500 Swatch beats.
The force that is driving the Swatch beat is the internet, and the perceived
need for surfers around the world to enjoy uniform time. So when it is
@500 Swatch beats in Biel, it’s @500 everywhere. The trick is to
ignore the sun. In New York for example, a new Swatch day kicks in at
7 pm whereas here in Melbourne, it happens at 10 am. You just download
internet time from the Swatch site, and achieve global connectedness using
curtains, a coffee percolator, and the new version of Tomb Raider.
My first thought when I heard about this was, my God, what will the farmers
say? Unfortunately, the only English contribution on the Swatch feedback
page comes from a computer-generated animatrix called Sonya who lists
her place of residence as ‘Sony’s virtual world’. For
what it’s worth, Sonya loves Swatch beats, although it should be
noted that for virtual people, a middle of the night appointment is less
disruptive than it would be for you or me.
If the internet time idea takes off, the corporate precedent will be
set. From there, it shouldn’t be too long before the British government
announces that the people have finally become disillusioned with the silent
‘w’ in ‘Greenwich’, the city to be known thereafter
as ‘Rolex’. Pepsi will purchase the naming rights to the Fahrenheit
scale, only to discover it has made a horrible mistake when Coca Cola
outbids them for Celsius. Multinationals, not content with branding our
stadiums, parklands and streets, will begin laying claim to the terms
of reference for our natural world.
And all the while, time will march forward in discrete 1 minute 26.4
second Swatch endorsed bundles.
