So, here’s a little riddle for you: A family gets on a plane at 10:00 AM on Saturday and travels for 15 hours straight. They get off the plane at 8:00 AM Saturday morning. How is this possible?
The answer: Black magic. (Just kidding!)
The real answer: The plane’s engine was equipped with a flux capacitor. (Just kidding again!)
The really real answer: Time zones!
In case you’ve never given much thought to what time zones are or how they work, here is a brief explanation to help bring you up to speed:
Back in the 1400s, in the “age of exploration,” maps were all the rage. Anybody who was anybody had a big map or two hanging in their study, proving to their friends and acquaintances that they were among the geographically astute.
No garden party was complete without some pompous aristocrat bragging to his guests about his new map: “As you can see, this is the latest edition, complete with both North AND South America.”
With new continents being discovered every other month, and colonists constantly re-naming everything, the map-making industry flourished. Map-makers were equivalent to celebrity rock stars, and got invited to all the parties. No other profession could be deemed as awe-inspiring or fantastical as that of the map-maker.
But, as with all fads, public sentiment eventually changed, and the market fell out for geography-based art.
Once most everything had been discovered and charted, there just wasn’t anything left to get the people excited with. So, slowly but surely, map-makers everywhere lost their superstar status and were marked instead as social outcasts, falling alongside the lowly accountants and librarians.
Not all map-makers went down easily though. There were a few who tried to bring a bit of life back into their profession. They started changing the colors of different countries (“Look, everyone, France is PINK now!”), adding pictures of sea monsters in all the big oceans (“Sea serpents, and giant squids, and dragons, oh my!”), and making up things like “latitude.”
One of the most note-worthy of these fool-hardy concoctions was the creation of our present-day “time zones.”
Time zone borders are represented on maps by vertical lines running North to South. These should not be confused with “longitude” lines, which are also represented by vertical lines running North to South.
To help distinguish these two nearly identical, cartographical “helps” from each other, map-makers chose to “have some fun” with the time zones and randomly zig-zag their boundaries, sometimes choosing to follow the borders of countries, and other times cutting them right in half.
The main purpose of time zones is to ensure that international travelers going from East to West (or vice versa) are utterly lost and confused when they arrive at their destination. And, in that regard, they do their job very well. So well, in fact, that I was admiring a sunrise during our trip only to watch the sun sink down below the horizon and disappear. It turned out that I was looking at a sunset, and didn’t have a clue.
Anyway, I guess all of this useless yammering is just my way of getting around to the fact that our family is completely messed up right now due to jet lag.
Day is night, night is day, and life is weird. (To give you a little taste, here is what the boys were doing at 2:00 AM this morning, after waking up from what their bodies were convinced was merely supposed to be their regular afternoon nap.)
It’s looking like it’s going to be an interesting week.
