Not A Blog™

Numerous times in the past, I have made comments to the effect of preferring analogue watches and clocks over ones with digital readouts. Common sense might tell you this is counterproductive and perhaps suggest that, at the very least, I’m merely being pretentious. Why yes, you hear your caricatured doppelganger mental model of me say, I always prefer observing my analogue chronometers whilst sipping on a snifter of Armagnac and reading The New Yorker, chortling through my nose as I pretend to actually understand the punchlines of their humorous little cartoons. While the latter part of that segue may, in fact, be true, there is more to my preferring analogue clock faces than the highfalutin factor. However, I would have been hard pressed to say why until I was forced to use a digital readout.

In addition to breaking my leg back in August, I also broke my watch. Oddly enough, I remember absolutely nothing about this happening. The watch had a metal band, so you would think I’d have felt it ripping off my arm, but I suppose the pain of cracking bones eclipsed it. In any case, I realized I didn’t have it at the hospital. It was returned to me the next day, in about five pieces and with a shattered face. I wasn’t too disappointed because it had cost me about $7.34 at Walmart, but still, kind of a hassle considering everything else that happened. No matter. I would just use my cell phone.

Insomuch that it told me what time it was, my cell phone worked fine. It wasn’t as convenient as having the time on my wrist, but it got the job done. So I’m walking around (Ah, well, not really)—crutching around checking the time. You wouldn’t necessarily think it, but a man with a broken leg has a lot of places he needs to be, particularly in the military. However, as I was going about my day, I noticed myself getting into a curious habit. When I looked at the time, I would often mentally translate the read out from the number to its dial representation.

This seems inefficient. If nothing else, it certainly took longer to accomplish than just reading the numbers and going on with my day. I figured one of two things has to be going on here: either I’ve been using analogue watches for so long that it’s just ingrained in me by now, or there’s more going on. Turns out it’s the second one, and it took me about two weeks of deliberate introspection to figure out what it was.

If I may go off on a tangent, I’ve always found it interesting that most people routinely count in two bases: base-10, of course, and base-60. If I ask you Americans what is three-quarters of a dollar, you would say without hesitation that it’s 75 cents. Along the same lines, if I ask you what is three-quarters of an hour, you will also respond without hesitation: 45 minutes. It goes the other way, too, carrying the one (the hour). I could ask, “what is 20 + 50 in base-60?”, but stated that way it’s probably unlikely most people would realize the answer is 110. But those same people could easily calculate that twenty minutes plus fifty minutes is an hour and ten minutes. This is easy enough to count in one’s head, but—for me, anyway—even easier to visualize.

I started noticing that when I was calculating time, I preferred to do so with the mental image of an analogue clock face. The numbers were all fine and good, but if I needed to figure out when some event was taking place, I preferred a picture. The angles and rotations covered by the hands of an analogue clock have more intrinsic meaning to me than a number like 5:23. To be sure, this is a quirk of my brain, which has always preferred the concreteness of geometry over the abstraction of numerical algebra. An analogue clock is defined by geometry, so it makes sense this would come more naturally.

In practice it means that, rather than using the actual scheduled time of events to plan my day, I use the shape formed by the hands at that time. In other words, if I have a Monday morning meeting at 10:00 am, I’m actually waiting for the shape of a ‘V’, canted slightly to the left so the long arm points straight up and the sort arm goes off to the left at sixty degrees. Knowing the meeting is scheduled to last for one hour, when the two hands have closed to thirty degrees (the longer having traversed the face of the clock in the mean time), I’ll be looking to get back to my desk. If I’m meeting someone in half an hour, I simply need to flip the minute hand about its perpendicular transverse axis and I’ve got my answer.

I’ll admit: it sounds more complicated when I write it out in words this way, but it’s quite a bit easier for me to do. Easier enough that I automatically correct digital readouts to analogue shapes, and then back again after I’d figured my answer. I’ve been doing it so long it almost seems like I’ve developed a sort of synesthesia for it, where 47 “feels” like “left” and a little “up” while 23 “feels” like “down to the right”. Hours are less stable, as one might suspect: 12 feels like it’s both perfectly rigid and falling over, although perfectly rigid wins out. How often do you do something at 12 minutes past? You just round it to ten—a value which has its own split personality: equally off center to both sides. It depends on the context.

In any case, it really started to get on my nerves after about a month. So much so, that the first opportunity I had, I went and bought a regular analogue watch once again. It just gives one a better feel for the shape of time.

-Ted

Next Page »