Obviously, if part of her job involves accepting transfers from another service that uses 24-hour time, she *should *know how to convert it. I am surprised she got the job without it being flagged as a concern, really.
However, I don’t think it’s altogether fair to assume that *everyone *should understand military time, though. Maybe it’s something that’s taught in schools now, but it sure wasn’t when I went through.
Probably something to do with that whole AM/PM thing that works so well for the rest of us.
Honestly, I didn’t encounter the use of military time until I was in my late 20s. I’d heard it used in movies, but that was it. I’m now 34 and have never met anyone else who used it.
(The guy who used it wasn’t even in the military. It was part of some weird ‘smarter than you’ power trip he liked to play on people.)
I was in my late thirties when I visited a company just north of Philadelphia. I was a VIP customer there for some training. That meant I was escorted around the place by one of the High Holies, and the first morning there was a spread of food on a table in the training room.
Nonchalantly, I bit into my sampling, made a face, and spat it out into my napkin. My host was mortified. “What’s wrong?” he asked, fetching me a glass of water.
“These donuts are stale!” I said, still puckering and spitting.
“But, those are bagels,” he said quietly.
It was the first time I’d ever seen one, much less tasted one. I’d heard of them, but that was all. I guess in retrospect it wasn’t horrible. But when you’re expecting a cake donut, it’s a bit of a shock to the system.
Anyway, I mention this incident to illustrate the point that people can go for a long time without significant exposure to some particular piece of the culture.
I get your point. I remember my first bagel A jewish student in high school was horrified to learn that I had never had a bagel. She told her mother and the next day she brought me a bagel with cream cheese and lox.
Huh. I like to tell people that for me, being raised Jewish meant having bagels for breakfast. (My father is a non-practicing Jew; I wasn’t raised Jewish except for the bagels.) I always get blank stares because no one realizes bagels are ethnic food anymore.
One justifiably gets to be an adult without understanding the “subtract 12” rule by not ever having been in a situation in which one needed to be concerned about knowing the “subtract 12” rule.
Whether the bus driver fits this bill or not is, of course, something we don’t know.
Actually, we do know this, to some extent - this driver’s job requires her to know 24 hour time, so that she can tell if transfers are still valid. Whether or not this transfer was the first time she had ever run into 24 hour time (maybe she was that new on the job), it is now her responsibility to learn how to deal with it, rather than just shrug it off and say, “I can’t do that.”
