What Time Is It?

Does the new economy need a wristwatch?

By Joe Celko

There is a neo-Luddite suggestion in the trade press that Internet stores locate the geographical position of shoppers and apply the local laws to them. Under this assumption, you would fill your shopping cart, type in your shipping information, proceed to checkout your items and be told that you had to empty the shopping cart because you are in Germany after 5:00 p.m. on a weekend, in Israel on a Saturday, in a fundamentalist Moslem country on a Friday, or a Baptist-held part of the southern United States on a Sunday.

I do not know what would happen if you were ordering Nazi war memorabilia, pork products, Victoria's Secret underwear, or beer in those locations, respectively. Will the e-tailer be required to report you to the local police? And you thought that tax collection on the Internet would be bad!

This is just one tiny facet of controlling a world in which you can do business any place on Earth via the Internet. To use an old song lyric, does anyone really know what time it is? Just trying to keep track of lawful time zones is more complex than anything old Soviet-style central planning dealt with.

Time Warp

The Darwin Awards are given each year to the deceased persons who died in the most creative way because of pure stupidity. You can find the past winners on several sites on the Internet, or in a recent book entitled The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action by Wendy Northcutt (EP Dutton, 2000).

The 1999 Darwin Award winner came from Jerusalem. On September 5, 1999, at precisely 5:30 a.m. Israel time on Sunday, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing three terrorists who were transporting the bombs. It was initially believed that the devices detonated prematurely, but the truth was that three days before, Israel made a premature switch from daylight-savings time (DST) to standard time in order to accommodate a week of Slihot, involving presunrise prayers. Palestinians refused to "live on Zionist time," and two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued. The bombs had been prepared in a Palestinian-controlled area and were set to DST. The terrorists had switched to standard time, and the bombs detonated in transit.

Finding the Right Time

You think people would learn from experience, but that's not so. Back in 1996, Mexico started to align its clocks to coincide with the United States and Canada. But in December 2000, President Vincente Fox changed the DST period, making summer start a month later and end a month earlier. This panicked the border states in the North, which pressured President Fox into letting them stay in line with the United States, which they deal with on a daily basis.

Just to make things worse, in March 2000 Major Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Federal District decided that he would not be bullied by the gringos and unilaterally abolished DST for the Federal District. The Federal District is in the middle of Mexico City and the overwhelming majority of its workers live outside of it. He then had to let the stock market go on DST, so that they could be in synch with the New York Stock Exchange. And then the public schools decided to ignore the Mayor and stay with the rest of the country. The whole issue will go the Mexican Supreme Court sometime in 2001.

Me, I am just going to try to remember if we have a leap second in 2001 and when Bock Beer season starts.

Joe Celko [www.celko.com or 71062.1056@compuserve.com] works at Trilogy Software. His opinions are not necessarily those of his employers. He is the author of Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999).