I have been out of the service for 114 years now but my watch is still set to a 24 hour format.

That's when Teddy Roosevelt signed my discharge papers (or so how it feels now).

It's been that way because in Alaska summers it's just as bright at 2100 as it is at 0900. When I came Stateside I went to sea out of Philly and the industry uses the 24 hour format based on local time.

As a ham radio guy everything is based on UTC on a 24 hour format and my Timex DXpedition watch has the second time zone set to UTC. UTC is also called Zulu time. It's used exclusively in ham radiomainly to get everyone on the same page. By it's very globetrotting nature it saves hams from having to figure out who is in what time zone.

A couple of months ago I scouted around and discovered using a 24 hour format isn't that uncommon. Besides the seagoing transportation industry a lot of long haul truckers use the format.

Wiki says this:The 24-hour clock is commonly used there only in some specialist areas (military, aviation, navigation, tourism, meteorology, astronomy, computing, logistics, emergency services, hospitals), where the ambiguities of the 12-hour notation are deemed too inconvenient, cumbersome, or dangerous. 

Logistics is a big field and covers an awful lot of careers and businesses.

About ten or so years ago I was at what passed as a party of some sort and I guess some somewhat snooty woman asked me what time it was. I held out my watch for her and it read 2005.

Looking back at it, I should have set it to the UTC mode first as it would have been 0005 the next day and really confused her. 

When she said she didn't read 'military time' I pointed out that a 24 hour format is used practically everywhere else in the world except for the English speaking part of it and told her it was 8:05 pm.

When you think about it for even a couple of seconds using 'am' and 'pm' is a pain in the a$$.

Anyway, the woman complained about me to the hostess that happened to be one of my admirers and she replied, "Can you navigate a 40 foot sailboat steering by the sun and stars between Honolulu and Seattle? He can and he has. He made landfall in coming straight into the Strait of Juan de Fuca dead on. You can't. That man  knows far more about the basic mechanics of the planet than you do."

I ran into the woman admirer a while back right after the Suez Canal got blocked and she asked me what that was going to do for imports. She has a pretty understanding brain. I told her it would mean ships would have to run about another 7 to 10 days to cover the lost 4500 miles and would increase the costs of many imports. 

(Meanwhile I heard some guy, a total dolt, say that wouldn't effect us because the Suez Canal is on the other side of the world.) 

It also of irks me that people think that electricity is some magic power that comes from little plugs on the wall. They seem to forget that there's some engineer on duty in the middle of the night running a console some where at 0300 making about $175,000 a year so that she can turn on the light when she gets up to pee at 0300.

Then again people like that seem to think that their kid sitting in a cubicle making $45K/year is somehow morally superior than a guy making $80K during the last part of his lineman apprenticeship because her son went to college.

Over the years I've answered the question of where I went to college by replying "I didn't. I finished grammar school. When you learn how to read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide you can teach yourself practically anything."  

Update: I just reformatted this laptop to the 24 hour format on UTC because I use it when I am on the air.

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