Anyone got the right time?

Anyone got the right time?


C’MERE ’TIL I TELL YA
Daniel Carey

PEOPLE are always complaining that they don’t have enough time. So what did you do with the extra second you had on New Year’s Eve?
For those who don’t know, an extra second was added on December 31 by the world’s official timekeeper. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service gave the go-ahead for the ‘leap second’ to bring the most accurate atomic clocks in line with the astronomical day.
Big Ben in London was adjusted accordingly, while BBC Radio 4’s hourly six ‘pips’ was extended to seven.
A friend tells me he used the additional second to try out a new leap he had been working on.
One contributor to an RTÉ News feature on the ‘leap second’ pointed out that the obsession with time is a relatively new phenomenon. In the mid-1800s, there wasn’t even a single zone for the entire country – there was Dublin Time, Mullingar Time, Ballinasloe Time and Galway Time.
And while timekeeping may be very precise now, it’s not so long ago since many people didn’t even know how old they were. When the state papers for 1978 were opened recently, it contained news that one Limerick family turned down the ‘Centenarian’s Bounty’, paid by the President to mark 100th birthdays.
A social welfare officer visited the woman who was approaching her 100th birthday in August 1978 to tell her that she would receive the President’s gift, but he was met with stunned surprise from her family. He was told that she could not remember her date of birth ‘but believed that she was 93 years old’.
The social welfare officer spoke to the woman’s daughter, who said it would upset her mother if she realised that she was almost 100. The daughter refused to accept the gift (which in those days was £50) on her mother’s behalf.
Children of a certain age are bound to ask how it is that Santa Claus is able to visit every house in the world in a single night. The answer, of course, lies in the time difference between countries – when it’s 11am in Dublin, it’s 6am in New York. The concept can be difficult for some.
The New Zealander Wayne Smith spent the mid-1980s coaching at Italian rugby club Casale Sul Sile alongside team manager Dino Menegazzi. The pair were chatting before a game in Rome when the Italian asked: “What time would it be in New Zealand now?” Smith looked at his watch and said: “Well, it would be about one o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Menegazzi, whom Smith described as ‘a cracking fella but a little gullible’, couldn’t get his head around the time difference. “Nah,” he said, “it can’t be tomorrow down there, really?”
“Well if I rang my mum and dad,” Smith replied mischievously, “they could tell us if we won the game or not.”
Menegazzi scratched his head, looked at Smith and suddenly slammed his fist on the table. “Ring them,” he said, “and if we haven’t won, we won’t play.”