Time watching is an obsession

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, February 9, 2007

Brother, can you spare the time?

Increasingly, it would seem, the answer is no. Because even if there is just as much time as there always has been, it is in shorter supply than ever.

Just ask anybody who is responsible for cooking a family dinner every night. There is so seldom time to cook a “real” meal that it becomes a remarkable event for most when what is on the table required more than 15 minutes of preparation.

The proliferation of deli counters and prepared foods is one sign. Another is that you can walk up to many vending machines, plunk in a couple of bucks, then heat in a nearby microwave until you have pretty much the same dinner you ate at home the previous night.

That’s OK, because between one thing and another, there just isn’t time to eat right most evenings — and hardly ever at noon either.

Highway speeds are another sign. Although we used to get along quite well at 55 mph, nowadays 70 isn’t even fast enough. Head out on the interstate at that speed and watch the world pass you buy. But where are people going so much faster? What are they racing towards or away from? Is the grass really so much greener on the other side or does it just seem that way?

Our obsession with the minutes has even begun to cost us more time.

Consider a typical home telelphone with built-in speed dial. For most of us, it takes a good 10 minutes of instruction-reading to figure out how to program, then another minute for every number we load in: Our mom, our neighbor, our office. Dialing the old-fashioned way (by pushing 7 buttons, that is), it takes about 5 seconds to make a call. Since a speed dial requires pushing a button or two, it may save half that time.

When you factor in all the minutes spent programming the numbers in the first place, it becomes clear that speed dialers actually cost more time than they save.

Our clock-laced environment is much the same. A house with a new microwave and oven set now will have two digital clocks within three feet of each other, exemplifying the old saying: “Give a man a watch and he will always know what time it is. Give a man two watches and he will never be sure.”

So the modern kitchen blessed with two stove-area clocks becomes a torture chamber either of uncertainty or of clock-synchronization every time there is a power outage.

Not much time gained there.

A few years ago, I quit wearing a watch. I had become so obsessed with the time that I found myself constantly flicking my wrist to check on the passage of minutes. One day, I simply undid the strap and left the watch home. With a clock in the car, a clock on the computer, a clock on the stove and on the wall and on the TV screen, why bother carrying one on the wrist?

In a worst-case scenario, I simply ask somebody standing nearby for the time. But as the years have gone by, people’s reactions have grown stranger, progressing to a near-disbelief that I am without my own means of telling time.

“This man does not value the time,” their expressions clearly say.

It is a hard concept to swallow in a time when time is becoming scarcer every day.

Journal publisher David Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.