Heh. That’s another NLP exercise. I believe that Einstein came up with it.
Well I would certainly say moving the birth sign forward would require magic.
True enough. (But what about born-agains?)
There’s all kinds of magic going on with those guys.
It seems to me this has nothing to do with our perception of “time”, per se. More precisely, it’s about how we view future events.
If I say, “I’m going back in time,” I think pretty much everyone would understand that means I am moving from the present into the past. If I say, “Spock went back in time,” we would understand that he moved from his present into his past, which may be our past or present, but could also be our future. If I say, then, that “I’m going forward in time,” it clearly means that I’m moving into the future. And specifically, if I say, “I’m going back 30 years,” or “I’m going forward 3 days,” you’ll know how far into the past or the future I intend to go.
So to me, intuitively, if you say you’re moving a Wednesday meeting “forward 2 days,” my first impulse is to think it’s on Friday. Because if I were to move forward 2 days from Wednesday, that’s exactly where I’d be.
But I can also easily conceive of events as a series of objects in a horizontal “stack”, like a set of files in a drawer. If you asked me to move the middle file all the way “forward”, I would of course move it toward me, to the front of the drawer, so that it is the first file I encounter.
So it seems the question is not whether we see ourselves moving forward, backward, upward, or twirling towards Freedom, but whether we see events moving in time vs. in space. In that sense, I intuitively see them as moving in time, but I’ve long since realized that many (if not most) people see them as moving in space, so I always ask.
As for tdn’s sub-poll… don’t like it. 
When I picture “time”, I picture a left-to-right timeline, and if you ask me to picture myself on that timeline, I’d put a little stick figure of me on there, and picture it walking from left to right. If I do what tdn is asking - that is picture the line as though I’m standing on it - I feel a little vertigo, and then I picture it stretching out ahead of me, like a road reaching to the horizon:
…Future
…|…
…/…Death
…/…|
…/…
…/…Now
…/…|
…and then behind me…
…
…Birth…/\
…|…/…\
…/…\
…/…\
Because if I were the little stick figure, this is what I would see. If you told me to move forward on that road, I’d move toward Future. If you told me to pick up a box next to me and move it forward, I’d move it toward Future. And if you told me to pluck the “Death” sign out of the ground and move it forward, I’d move it toward Future.
Man, that was hard to draw!
Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom! Haaa!
Very cool, though, thanks! I get pretty much the same imagery, but without the vertigo and stick figure.
I don’t know if I should call it vertigo, but that’s the best word I have for it: I’m looking at the little people in the model town, and then - whoosh! - I’m in the model town, a la Beetlejuice.
The “death” sign is in front of me, the “birth” sign is behind me. I’m standing on “now.” And if my spam-posting hasn’t reminded people enough, I’m a Monday.
And I notice that none of the Fridays seem to have responded to my citation of the “situated in advance” definition for “forward.” 
I’d say that I’m walking on the line, with “My Birth” behind me and “My Death” in front of me. I’m a Monday.
Errr… I don’t see this at all. Except in extraordinary circumstances people don’t stand in the middle of chess boards. What happens 99.9999% of the time is that a player moves a piece “forward” and it goes further away from them. Pointing out an extremely rare exception would not seem to support your position.
Which isn’t to say I agree with the “Fridays.”
As several people have posted, it’s a matter of usage. And Elfkin477 effectively demolished the Friday goobers by listing the Top 10 Google hits for “moved forward” … every one of which was used to mean occurring sooner (rather than later.)
You can argue that an expression should mean something other than what it means… but in this case the Friday people’s reasoning is not decidedly more logical than the Monday’s and popular usage is overwhelmingly against them.
Again: Overwhelmingly against them.
Yes, but the example is meant to establish that you are in the middle of time (with past being one color of chess pieces and future being the other). When you’re the player, you’re sitting at one end, not the middle, so your perspective is totally different. Thus, the analogy. Not the best ever, but I got what they were going for.
I’ve always thought that being “pushed forward” means earlier in time - I’m a Monday person. I can see where Friday people are coming from, though- if we’re talking about time as absolute rather than relative, a meeting that goes forward through time would be two days later, not earlier, just as time traveling to the past would be going “backwards” in time. However, I think of events as relative to the present: a meeting next Wednesday, for example. Being pushed forward would mean being pushed towards you - after all, forward comes from fore, or before. So the meeting is scheduled for earlier than its original date.
If some of the Fridays are so insistent that workplaces use their mode of thinking, perhaps this is a regional issue?
Make the announcement about the change on Tuesday. Problem solved!
I thought Friday.
To me, BOTH words would put the meeting on Monday . . . which is strange, since I think I’m somewhat angrier than most people.
This is exactly how I pictured it - walking straight ahead down a flat strip of time. A white paper strip at that, boxed and dated. Forward is the next date on the strip because it is the direction I’m facing.
I would never in a million years have thought ‘Monday’.