After so many years I have a hard time telling time with a

12 hour am and pm clock.

As a GI it was 24 hour time, as a sailor it's been the same thing and as a ham operator it's also been the same thing but with a twist. Hams use UTC, once referred to as Greenwich Mean Time.

I think in 24 hour time and it gets to be a pain in the ass when I have to deal with a landsman, non-vet or member of the scientific community.

My watch is set to 24 hour time and unless I take a second to stop and think of who I am talking to if asked for the time I am very likely to answer in 24 hour time which often times confuses people. To my own credit I generally do realize who I am talking to so people don't want to have me carted off.

Still, 24 hour time has always made sense to me and I figure that those that are am and pm people are just plain either too lazy or stupid to bother to figure it out. It doesn't take much.

Going around on a 12 hour clock face and adding am and pm really doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it. There are 24 hours in a day and each hour really ought to get its own number assigned to it.

If I had to guess this probably goes back to the sun dial days. Back then only sunny hours counted and there were no clocks. What time was midnight was actually just anybody's guess.

Personally when I run into a situation like that I tend to ask dentists and gynecologists because their guess is as good as anyone else's.

I actually told a boss that once when he had an unsolvable problem to decide. He asked me who would know and I told him to try calling a dentist. He looked stunned and asked me why he should call a dentist and I told him that his guess was about as good as anyone else's.

I instantly got a dirty look which changed to a look of understanding. He told me that I was probably right. It was pretty much an unsolvable problem. When the problem went upstairs he said the same thing to HIS boss who was confused and asked why and was told the same thing I had said.

Of course, it went back down the chain and back to me and I then suggested they call the Walmart greeter and gave the same reasoning. 

Finally some suit came charging down and asked me as I was the guy running the operation and I explained to him that they had given me an unknown value to work with and as a result I had nothing to work with. It took a little doing but I finally got the suit to understand that X+500 is X+500 and until I was given the value of X I did not know what the actual answer would be.

Back to 24 hour time, it just makes sense to give every hour its own number instead of the easily confusing am and pm system.







To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY