James O'Brien

I had to be at work this morning at about 7.30 to head out to the Royal Easter Show. I woke, of course, just after the alarm on my mobile phone went off at 6am. I only pressed the snooze button once and was up and ready for the world at about 6.15. Feeling good about life, I got up and went for a walk around the block, before returning home for a shower at about 7am. At about 7.20, I put a call in to my colleague June to tell her I’d be there in about 15 minutes, ahead of going out to Homebush. No answer. That’s odd, I thought, but I just assumed she must have been busy.

On getting into a cab I looked at the time on the clock. It was 8.30am. “I think you need to re-set your clock, mate, it’s the wrong time”, I said. To which he replied, “No no it’s right”. At that point I showed him my mobile phone with the time still clearly 7.30am. I then got on to June who also told me it was 8.30am, though another colleague Tim also insisted it was 7.30am. When it was clear to me it wasn’t, I rang Tim, urgently telling him we were bothan hour late.

Clearly both Tim and I were victims of the modern technological era. We both rely on our mobile phones as alarm clocks. And while the cleverness of our mobile phones acknowledged the whole world was changing back to regular standard time (and changed accordingly), they hadn’t realised in NSW our time change doesn’t happen for a further week.

In chatting to an older bloke – he would have been about 60 years old – he told me his son called him this morning asking him “dad what time is it?”. Clearly he was in the same boat and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were many other people who were late for work today. Early adopters and younger Australians beware – don’t rely too heavily on modern technology.

Anyway, it was a fun day at the Royal Easter Show, even if it was more work than pleasure today. With just a limited amount of time to wander and enjoy, I concentrated on my favourite exhibits – livestock and produce.

After walking around for a while I looked back at my mobile phone. In changing the time zone to accommodate the daylight saving time situation, some of calendar information (synched with Outlook and Google) is now inaccurate – shit – shit – shit, but at least I’ll be able to get up on time tomorrow. I hope.