Thursday, September 13, 2007

25 hours!!

I don't know if it's the new fad but these days every day seems to be too busy. There hasn't been a single day which I can point to on the calendar and say, in absolute terms, 'There. That is a day of leisure'. Yes, this includes weekends also. Anyway, today, in the midst of another one of those new-fangled busy days, I found myself doing some math. No, I wasn't trying to sleep by counting the sheep.

Like I was saying, the days are only getting busier by the day. And we are the ones bearing the brunt of this change. Now-a-days, I don't seem to remember when I sleep and how much I sleep. By the time I hit the sack, it's tomorrow already and when I wake up, far from feeling refreshed, I feel like going back to sleep. Given the busy nature of my day, this the only possible sleeping arrangement I can have and because of this, at work, I am not sure if today is yesterday still or it's tomorrow already. I have been in this befuddled state for a while now and can feel it growing by the day. Am not sure when it will reach its optimal proportion but I know that will be the day I exchange my business formals for a couple of trendy straight jackets and go in for a shift in residence. I am sure I am not up for that kind of a change in life style yet. So I was looking at the options available to me to get out of the befuddlement.

And that is where the math comes into play. You see, for some time now we have been using the 24 hours = 1 day scale to measure our days. I am not sure which genius came up with this, but it's probably some ancient Egyptian or Indian or Greek. This ancient scale, and I mean REALLY ancient, hasn't seen much change in all the time between then and now. That, I feel, is the main reason for the days becoming busier. If only they had thought of some flexible scale which would have allowed the day to have something like 26 or 30 hours whenever you have lots of work and something like 20 hours when you don't have all that much to do on a day, that would have helped a lot. So, on the back of thoughts like this, I was trying to find out how the year and months would look like if we had 25 hours a day but the same number of hours in a year.

Right now it is 24 x 30 x 12 hours every year (roughly). If we consider 25 hours a day in a 12 month year having the same number of total hours, then it would be 25 x 12 x 28.8. This means approximately 29 days a month, which in effect means that instead of having January, February, March etc till December, we will end up having February-1st Month, February-2nd Month, February-3rd Month and so on till the 12th Month of February. The downside to this is that all our holidays vanish, gone down the drain along with the old calendar. But the upside is that we can now have a Valentine's Day every month, all round the year!! I can see this is a tough choice. But being a November born myself, this isn't such a tough choice for me. Why? Well, now that there will be no more November, I won't have any more birthdays which means I won't age anymore!!

I say, bring on the 25-hour day.

2 comments:

N said...

Monday ' Sep 10 was a day of leisure .. check out your blog.. Dude you can't forget these things now beause you are manataining journal entries for the world to see!!

AVP said...

Ah! You probably are referring to my 'Near Miss' post, in which case the very first line says "Compared to the tight schedule I was working under these past couple of weeks, today I was positively free."

Please note the comparison I was making. That day was no less busy in absolute terms.