From My Time Zone, With Love
On the quiet joy of living in the wrong time zone — a letter from Galicia, Spain.
When I smile and say ‘please, text or call anytime,’ here’s what I do not mean:
This is hereby an open invitation for you to wait several hours and then reply at 3:30 AM. When I'm asleep.
Now, this is a hypothetical example. I’m not so petty that I’d openly berate someone on the public internet who may have allegedly done this. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental and honestly? A suggestion to the contrary hurts my fee-fees. I’m a gentle, self-respecting indigo child. I would never, under any circumstances, resort to public shaming after having explained the time zone situation a mere several times, both before and after moving abroad.
I’m not unreasonable. If an event of biblical proportions occurred — an increasingly regular phenomenon — I’d be thrilled to be awakened during REM sleep, while dreaming of a Pure Land curiously devoid of inane bullshit, to deliver my knowledgeable commentary in a state of uncharacteristic manic delirium. I’d even make coffee.
How grand I’d feel if I got that call.
Is this Reese? Yeah, this is the President. President of the United States. And we won, by the way, in a landslide, everyone knows it except RADICAL LEFTISTS LIKE CRAZY NANCY PELOSI! Look, I have my people here in the War Room. Fantastic people, the best. They start wars. And they’re telling me, ‘Sir, we need Reese from Bebop Libre.’ Because we have a war. That’s why we have the War Room, they tell me. Very serious. A crisis. Some people say we caused it. I don't know, maybe we did. But that’s not important. What’s important is we’re on the precipice. The world, our nation, the whole thing. Not good. And we found you. We were surveilling blogs — very routine, totally legal — of people whose passports we’re going to revoke for political reasons, because we can do that now. And yours came up. Beautiful blog, really tremendous. And our AI… we have the best AI, by the way, it’s called ChatGPT, I came up with the idea for it — it said you’re the one, like Keanu Reeves from The Matrix. Have you seen that movie? Anyway, you’re uniquely qualified. Only person who can solve this. Except for me, but I'm working on a blog of my own. It's going to be huge. Better than yours, no offense.
Oh, to be recognized for my analytical skills by an individual of such unimpeachable credibility and moral character.
I once worked for a very credible and moral company in the aerospace industry that hadn’t updated its job titles since the Paleolithic, so I was a “Programmer/Analyst.” I did, in fact, program and analyze. Rather, on a productive day, the order was normally reversed. There were other assignments — most of them work-related, yet informally carried out. One of these included acting as a conduit between my employer and the now-defunct Pivotal Software in exchange for Jimmy John’s sandwiches. And thirty minutes before I was to clock out one afternoon, I had also been assigned a dozen people, based out of Bangalore, whom I was to remotely train and guide. Outsourcing my own job to those I found most tender and amiable stirred ambivalence.
Meanwhile, I modernized databases and their abstract interfaces — supporting a real-time distributed messaging application critical to myriad sites spanning the United States.
I’m often mistaken for a college student, but: this all happened back in my mid-twenties. The modernization effort was met with fierce hostility and obstinacy from the subject-matter experts who “maintained” the aforementioned application. They and their former colleagues had created a labyrinth, an Escherian maze, of buggy vendor-specific stored procedures without version control, traceability, testability, or maintainability. Their stated reasons were couched in theoreticals clearly outweighed by the previously outlined problems, but the reality? Job security.
What I learned in my demoralizing attempt to “strangle” the old system was that bastardization would continue unabated in the new. The corruption was rooted in the same culture that would compel me to outsource my own job — leaving no time to find another between my usual coding duties, co-managing a “developer lab,” presentations, architecture reviews, security audits, and entertaining those around me with my trademark goblinry — while the company laid off coworkers mere years before their planned retirement. I wormed my way out of a broken home, spent years racking up student debt to attain an education, and was rewarded with the underpaid privilege to be surrounded by the very instability I tried to escape. This trajectory fucked me up.
Why am I telling you this? A couple of reasons. One, I prefer injecting autobiographical notes into what ostensibly appears to be a joke post, because the only readers who deserve to know are the ones who tolerate my zest. Two, my work experience might indicate I know something about [drumroll] time zones. But it turns out one need not have ever been a disgruntled “Programmer/Analyst” to be vaguely aware of a global convention everyone uses every day. By extension, it’s unnecessary to take a step further and construct a quantum oscillator for NIST. A vague awareness of when other people might be sleeping is achievable, I think, for the vast majority of the world population, but I’m not here to provide anything resembling help.
Instead, I shall address the peculiarity of my time zone here in Spain. It’s weird. Francisco Franco had something to do with it, because of course he did.
Since relocating to the northwestern autonomous community of Galicia, it’s been comparatively easier to reflect and think about time zones in a country with a government that’s not kidnapping and murdering as many people as possible. Au contraire, my host country has sent aid to the victims of genocide — rather than abruptly halting aid, dooming millions, and undoing a subsidized farming industry that voted for its own unlubricated assfucking. Now, I could comment on the implosion of a post-WWII international order that coincidentally favors Aleksandr Dugin’s notions in Foundations of Geopolitics, but that’s what everyone else is doing, whether they know it or not.
Time for your great-granpappy’s fascism.
Speaking of kidnapping, murder, and other activities preferred by xenophobia-certified theocratic nationalists supposedly beholden to the teachings of a refugee — who, to my recollection, advocated for something quite different than kicking your neighbors in the balls until they die — let’s segue to the past. When? Just before my antifa great-grandfathers deplorably fought in some world war for “freedom” and “rights.” Ha! Why would anyone want that? My ancestors were so unpatriotic and un-American. I’m truly ashamed. Like, can you imagine the sheer audacity of the idea that people who aren’t hurting anyone can enjoy their existence without being detained while conflicting commands are barked at them?
Anywho, in 1940, Franco’s regime aligned Spain’s time with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, adopting Central European Time (CET).
Today, that translates to Coordinated Universal Time plus one hour in winter (UTC+1), and UTC+2 in summer. For reference, Chicago is UTC-6 in winter, and UTC-5 in summer, but the ranges for the seasons are defined differently, just to add to your palpable confusion and fear. The time zones become even more annoying when you consider that Portugal is on Western European Time (WET), not Central — that’s UTC+0 in winter, and UTC+1 in summer.
What does all of that mean? Honestly, I don’t know, lol.
You might be wondering, “Reese. Dude. You just spent the past five hours patronizing everyone by way of an unhinged folksy tirade with elements of a résumé, origin story, and call to action speech in a B movie. We internalized your entire disjointed traumatic technobabble dump for ‘I don’t know, lol?’”
Uhhhh... erm. Franco. Time zones. Portugal. Spain. Galicia!
[Rebooting...]
I live in Galicia, north of Portugal. Let’s say I take the train here in Santiago de Compostela south to Porto. As soon as I cross the border, you know what happens? I go back in time one hour. As soon as I come back from drinking all of the port vino from the Douro River Valley, I’ll be wasted like that one time with the rakia in Bulgaria — homemade by a man who fondly referred to himself in broken English as The Genius of Gintsi. I’ll be super messed up… and I’ll have travelled an hour in the future! No doubt I’ll botch a train switchover and run late with one million notifications on my phone from my wife.
“Blame Franco,” I’ll text her at 3:30 AM, to which she’ll assume I made a new friend whose parents are clearly Francoists.
Now that you know why the time in Madrid is the same as Paris, subscribe to Bebop Libre to show your appreciation for my world-class, concise pedagogy. Stay tuned for the next post about a phenomenon known as AMOC… it keeps our weather much more oceanic here in Galicia as compared to the rest of Spain. Well, until it collapses.