27 Hours A Day???

Okay, I've had this idea for quite some time now, and judging from the reactions I've gotten from a few people at work and at home, I believe that it qualifies as craziness, perhaps even bordering on madness. Although on some levels, I am dead serious about this...

We need a 27 hour-a-day clock.

Everyone complains that they don't have enough hours in a standard 24 hour day to get everything finished. But what if we were to give everyone an additional three hours a day to get things done? People would conceptually have more time in their day. Of course it sounds impossible, considering that the current 24 hour clock is based around the rotation of Earth on it's axis and, at the onset, it seems that a 27 hour clock would throw the days and nights completely out of whack unless we were to slow the rotation of the Earth down which, with our current technology, is impossible. Life doesn't yet work like an episode of "The Superfriends", and no doubt that slowing the rotation of the Earth down would cause more problems than we's even care to imagine...

But these issues would hold no weight with the way in which I would implement things!

Here's the deal. In order to successfully implement a 27 hour clock, we would have to somehow fit it into the existing time framework of our current day. In practice, the 27 hour clock actually gives us no more or no less time than we started out with, but makes you believe that you've gained three hours through the clever distribution of hours, minutes, and seconds within the time frame available to us. It's purely a psychological thing, really, but an effective one nonetheless.

In order to do this, we break down our standard 24 hour day into the smallest measurements of time that we currently recognize on a global scale, that being the almighty second. If we multiply 60 seconds by 60 minutes, then multiply that result by 24 hours, we find that a typical Earth day lasts exactly 86,400 seconds. Okay, bearing that in mind...

The trick here is to take those 86,400 seconds and evenly divide them between more that 24 ndividual parts with no remainder leftovers, thus creating our hours and creating more hours than we started with. I take notice that, within the 24 to 30 hour range that we are looking at, that the numbers that will divide 86,400 evenly are 24, 25, 27, and 30. I chose 27 as opposed to a nice even number like 30 because I took notice that 30 would create an extremely noticeable deficit in the length of minutes and seconds within the hours... not so much the case with 27. And 25 would simply not create a significant amount of new hours to use in a day. The trick here is to make the person not only believe that he/she is losing little or no time, but is actually gaining quite a bit of it.

If we divide 86,400 by the standard 24, we end up with 3600 seconds per hour. If, on the other hand, we divide the same number by 27, we end up with 3200 seconds per hour. In our current way of thinking about time, that comes to a deficit of... oh, say... 6 minutes and 40 seconds per hour. With the hustle and bustle that goes on in everyday life, very few of us are actually going to miss that six and two-thirds minutes. Even less so when you consider what I have in mind next...

Now comes the task of breaking those 3200 seconds per hour into manageable minutes and seconds. Since 3200 is not evenly divisible by 60, and the idea is to gain as much time as we can while losing as little of it as possible, we increase rather than decrease the number of minutes until we find a number that 3200 does divide evenly by. Fortunately, our number is very close by, that number being 64. When we divide 64 by 3200, we come up with a result of... 50 seconds. Acceptable!

So, in retrospect, all minutes within the new time frame would last 50 seconds, for a total loss of ten measly seconds per minute. Given the pace of life as we know it, very few if any at all are going to miss that ten seconds. It takes most people ten seconds to take a piss, including the time it takes to flush the toilet and put the seat down. But... take a look at what we have gained! We now have an extra four minutes per hour to play with, not to mention that we have an additional three hours per day, all at the cost of no more than ten seconds per minute. 50 seconds times 64 minutes times 27 hours equals our magical number of 86,400 seconds. Eureka!

Of course, a new way to tell time would have to be implemented to supplement the new clock, given the uneven nature of it's amount of hours. We don't want something so far removed from the current way of telling time that people can't easily get their heads around it, as worldwide confusion is not the game we are in as confusion usually leads to fear and fear usually leads to hurt feelings and explosive devices flying back and forth. So here's what I propose: The new clock will have 13 AM hours, 13 PM hours, and a special hour that occurs at noon called "Meridian", or "M" for short. The day begins at midnight, 13:00am, similar to our current clock, and continues on in the usual manner, taking the lost seconds and additional minutes into account. Immediately after 12:63 and 49 seconds AM, Meridian occurs. It will be referred to as "Meridian O'Clock", "Quarter-past Meridian", "Meridian 40", whatever. On a digital clock, the above times would appear as "M:00","M:15", "M:40", and so on... Meridian has no AM or PM associated with it, as this is not needed. High noon would occur at M:32, since this is the exact middle of our day. After M:63 and 49 seconds, we go into 13:00pm, and we continue on in the usual manner, until we reach 12:63pm and 49 seconds, one minute before the midnight hour. Immediately after that, the clock rolls to 13:00am and a new day begins. As you've probably guessed, there is no Meridian that occurs at night, only at noon, as it's what gives us our 27th hour and keeps the clock in check.

Imagine the repercussions this would have on your professional life, and the advantages of which. Face it, folks, your work day is going to increase to nine hours instead of the usual eight. No sane employer is going to allow you to work eight hours given the inevitable loss of time dictated by the new clock, because in the overall time frame they would lose about 45-or-so minutes of production time on a 24 hour clock. Here's the kicker... you may be working nine hours, but you are still only working the same amount of time as you originally were, while getting paid for nine hours a day instead of eight! Let me break this down for you... 60 seconds times 60 minutes times 8 hours equals 28800 seconds. 50 seconds times 64 minutes times 9 hours equals... 28800 seconds! And you'd notice even less considering that your workday would be broken up into four-and-a-half hour stretches on either side of your lunch break. And what better hour to take your lunch break than... Meridian! Of course, your lunch break would technically be 400 seconds shorter within the given hour, but this actually has the advantage of shortening your work day by a couple of minutes. But all you would know if that you managed to get an additional four minutes on your lunch break because of the new structure of the hours. Employers would be happy because they'd be forced to step up production slightly to account for the shorter hours and they would get more done given the new nine-hour work day, which inevitably results in more overall profits for them. Employees would be happier, not only because they technically know that they are working no more amount of time than they were, not only because even after they work nine hours they know that they have an additional two hours per day for themselves, but also because they anticipate the additional pay that a 45 hour check at the end of the week brings them. Advantages all around, with dollar signs to spare.

And imagine the global industry that would be conceived as a result of the demand by the public for a new and now necessary 27 hour clock. Sure, the current clocks that people own would become obsolete... all the more reason to go out and buy a new 27 hour clock to properly tell time. Necessity is the mother of invention, and also creates demand. Companies willing to manufacture and sell these things would literally spring up overnight. New jobs would be created as a result, lowering the unemployment rate worldwide and increasing the overall world economy. Gadzooks! A hell of a lot more people would be making money, that's for damned sure... or at least they would be better off than they were. All at the cost of ten measly seconds per minute.

Of course, now... we must consider the chances that a crazy idea like this would ever even be considered, much less implemented, on a global scale. Granted, it would take some time, as some in this world are resistant to change of any kind. But some people think the Earth is still flat, some peoples' main method of transportation is a horse and buggy, some people still hunt for their own food with spears, and some people still browse the World Wide Web with Lynx. To these people I say: Catch up to the rest of us, or get left in the dust... such is the way of life. Throw out those 8-Tracks and get yourself some CDs, and while your out treat yourself to a new 27 hour clock. It's a competitive cut-throat world out there, held together by the belt of industry and innovation... so don't end up with your pants at your knees and your throat cut. Such is the way of the prison bitch...

Surprisingly, I think that the chance that this insane idea could be ingrained into the fabric of our human civilization is quite feasible when you consider just how fucked up our species really is at the level of the street. Because consider this... despite the differences between the nations of the world, despite the blood we've all shed and the wars we've had over petty shit, despite the differences in our cultures right down to the way we speak, read, write, and implement our languages... consider if you will that there are three things which, as a unified world, we have all managed to agree upon at this time in our development without fail, three things that most of us with a fourth-grade education have managed to adapt. They are as follows...

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AGREEMENT 1. Our unified use of the current way we calculate months, weeks, and days within the framework of a year.

AGREEMENT 2. Our unified use of the base 10 decimal numbering system, and the written characters which represent it.

AGREEMENT 3. Our unified methods of telling time within a single day.

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That last one is important! If the entire world, through one method or another, was able to implement and agree upon our current system of telling time without bludgeoning each other to death over it or considering monetary profit as a deciding factor in it's application, then why should they not agree upon and make use of a new method just the same considering the advantages it has for everyone across the board... including the monetary benefits? Crazy as this sounds, methinks this could be a top idea.

But of course, simple as life is once you break it down to it's lowest common denominators, it isn't so simple that we can just walk in with our heads held high and full of our crazy ideas and decide one day that we're just going to change the alphabet, or for that matter, re-invent established tried and true standards such as the wheel or our methods fot telling time. Because the very nature of the human genome is an opportunistic one, and is the reason that one such as me would even conceive a crazy idea such as the 27 hour clock in the first place. Think about it: The new clock was invented with the intention of giving people more time in their day. One day, however, hundreds of years from now, someone out there is going to be living with the reality that 27 hours are still not enough time in a day to get everything done. And they are going to face this reality head-on much as I did and invent... the 30 hour clock! Someday, hundreds of years from then, someone is going to realize that 30 hours a day are not enough time to get things done, and then they are going to invent... well... you get the picture. It's the same mentality that caused us to invent swords to cut each other to pieces, then invent metal armor to block the swords, then invent guns to go through the armor, then invent bulletproof vests to stop the guns, then invent armor piercing bullets to render the bulletproof vests useless... you understand. One thing negates the other and so forth and so on. In the end, when we are all living in the day and age of ten-second hours but still haven't gained or lost any actual time and still have the audacity to wonder why we don't have enought time in a day to get things done, someone who is not a Lemming is finally going to stand up and wonder what the point of all this new-and-better-clock bullshit actually was, and write an article about it much like I did. And he/she is the only one that's going to be right. Worst of all, this person is going to point the middle finger of blame directly at me, where it all started, and immortalize me as an idiot savant who had way too much fucking time on his hands for all eternity and a day.

Come to think of it, perhaps sticking to the standard 24 hour clock isn't such a bad idea after all. After all, the last person who tried to change the world on such a grandeur scale ended up nailed to two pieces of wood, and he had a much bigger set of balls and a much more productive purpose than I. So strike that idea.

Let's consider the calendar instead...

Kudos!