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Otis Does Not Recommend Time

by Dawn Corrigan

    I have been using this product since the moment of my birth (see Figure 1). And although I have redacted my birth year so you people can’t run my natal chart without my permission, rest assured, dear readers, that I have allowed ample opportunities for the product to demonstrate its utility and live up to its hype, such as that it is money and that it will tell.















    


  

   

    But I am here to tell you that I have been disappointed at every turn of the hourglass, flip of the calendar page, and passing of the Swatch.beats.

    Oh, it started out well enough. Shortly after my arrival, certain alleged parameters and features of the product were imparted to me: seven days in a week; twelve months in a year; ten years in a decade; thirty days in September, April, June, and November and thirty-one in all the rest except for February with twenty-eight, but not in a leap year. While the latter specification in particular hinted at a certain chaos and randomness under the apparent order, I duly memorized it. Later, I turned my attention to the product's finer minutiae: sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven years in a dog year, fifteen years in a cohort, a million years in an age.

When at the age of four I started kindergarten, I was able to understand some of the practical applications of the product more readily. The school year divided the product into discernible segments—before school, the school day, after school, weekends, summer break, and, most magical of all, snow days. While the school days were a mild nuisance, summer was a welcome respite, a container capacious enough in which to read all the books in the world, or a few good books over and over again.

Immediately after graduating from high school, I enrolled in college, and then in graduate school, and then, with one brief interruption, into more graduate school after that. Did I stay in school for so long because it was an environment where the product’s parameters made sense to me? Perhaps. Certainly when I began to weary of other aspects of the academic routine and contemplated entering the workforce in a more conventional manner, my biggest fear was that the product would no longer function well for me. But after a few weeks, I adapted.

That was in 1998, a year whose shape, dear readers, I’m sure you’ll agree, retains its integrity even now, bookended by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and containing the launch of the anti-vaccination movement and Windows 98, Voyager I’s ongoing evolution into V’ger, Phoebe giving birth to triplets, and other phenomena.

But shortly after that, the center loosened its grip and the passionate intensity of the worst reached near-historic levels. Did it start with Y2K? We were all so busy laughing about how the software didn’t break, perhaps we neglected to notice how the spiritus mundi itself had been infected with a virus. I spent that New Year’s Eve in Logan, Utah, serving as a crossing guard on a street with two facing bars, and all seemed well.

So maybe the trigger was 9/11 and its sky full of doomed planes reeling like dazed birds. But regardless of the specific mechanism, what is clear is that the product began to malfunction. Now I use up the product making endless calculations in an attempt to regain my understanding and my equilibrium: Do you realize that more time has now passed since 9/11 than between 9/11 and the Bicentennial? Do you know we are now older than Bob Ross when he died? Are you aware that the 21st century is already a quarter over?

The product is clearly broken beyond repair. Zero stars. Do not recommend.