It took a series of mundane events to unleash the disturbing new I heard yesterday morning. It all started two weeks ago when my wife, Anne, bought a set of placemats at the toy store—not silly cartoon character promotions but ones that actually were educational: They ranged from a map of the United States to an illustration of the solar system with the sun in the lower right corner and the nine planet balls sprayed up and out from it like a shotgun blast.
As soon as I saw them, I realized these placemats could give our ten-year-old son, Tommy, and me a chance to have fun at breakfast, which wasn’t his favorite time of day. The following Monday, I brought out the U. S. placemat at breakfast with “How would you like to test me on something?” It took a few minutes and some more words from me for Tommy to realize he would be testing me, at which point he grinned widely and nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “You give me the name of a state and I’ll try to name its capital.”
Much to his disappointment, I made it through thirty states before he caught me on Montana. “WRONG!” he shouted and laughed. I pretended to be crushed.
The next morning, I brought out the U.S. map again. “Okay, let’s try the states’ neighbors.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ask me to name each state that borders each other state. Take South Carolina, for instance—see how North Carolina touches it on the north and Georgia on the south? Those are its neighbors.”
“Oh.” He took the placemat back. “Who are Virginia’s neighbors?”
When I missed the next one, Tennessee, he shouted, “WRONG!” and laughed.
We only got through ten states before we had to stop so he could go to school. I only got half of them right, much to Tommy’s delight. He had just as much fun the rest of the week as I struggled with the remaining states and even more fun telling his mother how poorly I did.
The next week, I brought out the placemat with all the U.S. presidents through Obama. I tried to list them all in order but messed up the ones between Madison and Buchanon.
The third week, we used the world map. I told him I didn’t know the capitals of very many countries, so I suggested we reverse the process. “I’ll tell you the country, you find it on the map.” That game was good for two days until I ran out of names to ask him and he ran out of interest.
It was the benign-looking fourth placemat that produced my disturbing news. Above the shotgun-like illustration, the sun and the planets were listed across the top. Under each name were four categories of information: diameter, temperature, rotation, and revolution.
While I ate, I asked Tommy to read them. “Sun,” he read, “Diameter, 865,000 miles; Temperature, 11,000 degrees…,” and so on through Mercury and Venus. Earth as the next closest planet to the sun followed them: “Diameter, 7,927 miles; Temperature, 80 degrees; Rotation: twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes—”
“What!” I said. He read the figure again.
I was too stunned to speak. Could it be true that our day is four minutes shorter than the day we call a day! I thought the placemat must be wrong, so I asked my neighbor, Andy, about it. He’d taken a science course in eighth grade and had three kids, all a few years older than Tommy.
He scoffed. “Are you kidding? Everything you read on a placemat is true,” he said. “Well, maybe not those paper ones you get at diners. But yours is laminated and in color, so it must be right.”
His word wasn’t good enough, so I checked the internet. Two sources confirmed the placemat’s statement—23 hours and 56 minutes was correct.
But what happened to those extra four minutes? When I was growing up, a day was twenty-four hours, period. Were we being lied to all that time or did something happen we don’t know about? Andy thinks global warming has made the earth shrink. If it’s smaller, it spins faster, so the day gets through itself a little quicker.
I’m not so sure, but as soon as I figure out whether I’m working four minutes without pay or are being paid for four minutes I didn’t work, I’m going to do something: either contact HR or say “You’re right” when someone I don’t even know the time of day.