The Saddest Story I Ever Heard
I need to start by saying that this isn't my story; hell it wasn't even the story of the bloke who told it to me. I can't even credit the teller of the story, as it was told to me many years ago in an Irish pub by a man I met only briefly, and to be honest, the details are pretty hazy.
I may have been drinking. I can't even be sure there was a pub. It's all gone save the story.
But caveats caveated, here is that story...
Some years previously, the story's teller met an American post-graduate student who'd literally just arrived in Ireland that afternoon to pursue key research on his PhD. What was the subject of that PhD? Well, thrillingly he'd discovered an anomaly in the records of the 1916 Easter uprising in Dublin, in particular that the recorded timestamps of telegraphs sent from London and received in Dublin (and vice versa) didn't match, with discrepancies of the order of twenty-five and a bit minutes. Clearly, there was some extra layer of conspiracy or cover-up that no-one had spotted - until him. Back in America, he'd got his PhD subject agreed, had secured his research funding, and flown out. All he had to do now was hit the archives and start digging.
But let's put that aside for a moment, so I can tell you a different story. We're used to a world of fixed time zone areas, usually on a one hour offset from Greenwich, sometimes on a half hour offset (like Indian Standard Time (IST), which is UTC+05:30, or Australian Central Daylight Time, which is UTC+10:30), or occasionally even on a 15 minute offset (the tiny and only semi-official Australian Western Central Standard Time, which is UTC+8:45). But always some sort of neat (ish) offset.
It wasn't always that way, though. Originally, every town or city had its own local time based on when the sun was highest in the sky. (There's still a clock in Bristol with a pair of minute-hands, one showing GMT and the other showing local Bristol time some ten minutes behind).
Of course, when the railways got going this wasn't terribly practicable. But the solution adopted then was not the rigid world-spanning time zones of today, but was to instead synchronise towns and cities with the nearest big city using the newly invented telegraph. Thus it was that the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland acquired by law in 1880 not one, but two, time zones. Great Britain would run on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), as it still does. Ireland would run on Dublin Mean Time (DMT), which was set to exactly twenty five minutes and twenty one seconds behind GMT, or UTC−00:25:21 in modern parlance, which sounds mad now, but would have made perfect sense then. It wasn't until 1st October 1916 that new legislation in the British parliament changed Ireland to the GMT (UTC+0) time zone that it's still on today.
I think you can see where this story's going.
So my Irish storyteller had met this American in a pub, an American who, let's remind ourselves, had arrived in Ireland that day for a three-month funded research trip to research an anomaly that wasn't simply the heart of his PhD - it was his PhD. And the American had eagerly spilled all the details about his PhD and its exciting and intriguing subject.
Without thinking, my Irish storyteller had blurted out, "But won't that just be because during the rising, Dublin was on a time zone that was twenty-five something minutes behind London?"
I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be the American, to have your entire PhD disappear in a metaphorical puff of smoke. I mean, he might as well have just flown home the next day and handed his research funding back.
Can't have been that great for the Irishman who torched the American's dreams, either. To his credit, he still sounded a bit guilty when he told me the story several years later. But it was inevitably going to come out, so better sooner rather than later, right?
But it begs the question... What would I have done had I been the bearer of such devastating news? And what would you have done?
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