A Boy, a Girl and a Wormhole, Or, The Case of the Lost Hour (long and weird)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Did anyone else take a random leap forward in time today?

When I woke up, I looked at the clock. I vaguely remember it being 10.xxam. A little while later, a friend of mine calls to say she’s going running and asks if I want to join. We’ve done this before and have a fixed route. She starts from her house, 9-10 minutes later she arrives at mine, it takes us 20 minutes to get back to her house, and I run back to my house. All in all, 30 solid minutes of cardio.

At 9.46am, she starts. I look at the clock so I know when to go out to wait for her. I leave my apartment at 9.49am, as I want to do some stretching before she comes. I leave all means I have of telling the time in my apartment.

We run our usual route at what seems like our usual pace, but for some reason it’s not enough for me today, so instead of heading back home I make a detour and run for maybe an extra 15 or 20 minutes. Then I get home and find a text message from my mother asking if I want to have lunch with her, so I call her. We talk for a little while and I mention that I ran today. I check the clock to see how long I was out. It’s 11.41am. I tell her that I ran for over an hour and forty minutes, and it’s not until then that I realize how impossible that is. I did not run for another seventy minutes after parting with my friend.

Easy answer, right? I simply misread the clock when I left the house, it was 10.49 instead of 9.49. Nuh-uh. My mother’s text message, which I missed due to not being at home, arrived at 9.54.

I call my friend to ask if she happened to notice what time it was when she came in. She didn’t, but in her next breath she asks “Did an hour disappear for you too?”.

OK, now this is weird. I guess it is borderline possible that I ran for seventy minutes without noticing, but that she missed the same amount of time while being at home? Then she remembers that she too had a text message waiting for her when she came home. That one arrived at 11.09. We check our clocks; both read 12.06.

Even our waking-up-and-checking-the-clock experiences match. She also seems to remember the clock being 10.xx. But the same clock now reads 12.06. And my text message did arrive at 09.54, according to a clock that now reads 12.06.

So, either a) we somehow ran our usual thirty-minute route in ninety minutes or b) we stepped through a wormhole.

Could someone please get Professor Hawking on the phone?

2

Where are you, roughly? I am concerned that this phenomenon may spread.

3

Are your clocks self-setting?
If so, they could have been doing some arcane shift. I believe, mine works part time on another planet, since it’s often an hour or more off sometimes, then it sneaks back to its previous correctness.

4

You woke up after 10 AM and went outside at 9:49 AM?

5

I had something like that happen this weekend! Oh my. We are moving, and we left the new apartment at 12:35, then stopped at Home Depot to return something. It must have been only 15 minutes. When I got home it was 1:55! What happened to all that time…Home Depot isn’t that far. :dubious:

I think it’s the aliens. Are all the females pregnant? looks down at self Oh shit.

(disclaimer - I am not pregnant)

6

I’m also concerned that you woke up after 10, yet left the house before 10.

7

This concerned me too. However, when I first looked at the clock I merely glanced to get a general idea of what time it was, whereas when I checked the time when my friend left her house I memorized it so I would leave the apartment at an appropriate time, so I’m more inclined to trust my memory of the 9.49 time.

However again, I had mirc open when I left and I still do. According to the log, I went online at 10.28, went AFK at 10.35, and came back on at 11.44. So right now, the likeliest explanation seems to be that I simply misremember the 09.xx times.

Which still doesn’t explain the text message arriving at 09.54! I know it wasn’t there when my friend left her apartment, as it was my cell phone’s clock I checked at that point. There’s no way I could have missed it.

8

Was your friend using a cell phone to tell time also at that point? I know my phone gets its time from the service (not an internal clock), so if, for example, you both have verizon phones, and somehow verizon’s service was sending the wrong time to your phones, you could both be off the same way.

9

You mean the 09.54 text message from my mother? No, different services and an internal clock, but a good idea anyway.

Actually, I think I’ve solved the mystery. I remember that my phone was not in the charger this morning. I pulled it out of my pants pocket to check the clock. It is possible that I accidentally hit a key while pulling it out, which makes the screen light up with the instruction how to disable the key lock, but still allows the time to be displayed. Any text messages received are not shown until that instruction disappears seconds later. So if I checked the cellphone only once and then used my computer clock (which is how I remember it anyway), I could simply have missed the message. It’s unlikely, but it’s more likely than an invisible wormhole on our running route.

So: I get the text message while sleeping. I wake up at 10.xx, log into irc at 10.28, check the cellphone clock at 10.46 but don’t see the message due to the reasons outlined above, leave the house at 10.49, misremember the 10.xx times as 09.xx, return home at approximately 11.40. It all checks out.

Pity I logged into irc, really… it was a fun mystery while it lasted. I still don’t know why my friend feels like an hour disappeared out of her life, though.

10

So you’ve retconned an explanation. I’m sure this pleases the aliens who kidnapped you, stole that hour from your life, and performed unspeakable experiments on you involving lonks, canola oil, and cabbage. :slight_smile:

11

[sub]Nah, I’m just pretending to believe in this utterly absurd explanation. You see, Whitley Strieber and Lyndon LaRouche explained it all to me. Me and them are going to take those beeyatches out. Don’t tell anybody.[/sub]