24
When I first joined the Web Services Group of the I.T. company I work for seven years ago, my boss advised me to learn and use the 24-hour clock. The reason being if I used it in my schedules and reports to clients (most of whom lived on the other side of the world) there would never be any ambiguity about time.
This never had any real impact on the way I kept time until we had to schedule downtime for one of our client’s web servers a few years ago. The agreed time was 1:40, or so I thought after having read the email from my boss regarding the schedule.
So there I was that afternoon on the webmaster’s pc, happily pushing buttons on PC Anywhere taking the servers down as per schedule. Not ten minutes later I get an overseas call from the client, screaming what the f*ck had happened to his website. I told him about the downtime. He said he knew about the downtime, and that it wasn’t supposed to happen until 12 hours later, when his users in the western hemisphere were asleep.
I looked at the email again and realized my mistake. He meant 1:40AM — if he had meant 1:40PM he would have said 13:40.
I apologized profusely to my client and proceeded to bring his servers back up again. It was a good thing that a few mouse clicks could rectify my mistake, and that the client decided that the downtime that resulted from my mistake was not long enough to have caused a loss of income for him and therefore he would not sue our company.
Since then I configured the clocks on all the computers to which I had access on 24-hour time format. Better safe from now on than sorry again.
Feeling the Weekend
The weekend is a part of the week lasting one or two days in which most paid workers do not work. This is a time for leisure and recreation, and/or for religious activities.
It’s been a while since I’ve really felt the weekend. For the past couple of months I’ve been either working on the weekend or catatonic from sheer exhaustion from the working days previous. This long weekend was different, though, with the Friday of Eid al Fitr. Though I was pretty much still catatonic on Friday, the rest day allowed me to be alert and adventurous on Saturday.
So the family finally went on that long-awaited trip… to the Luneta Park! Kuya Maui was on a leadership seminar (as one of the representatives for Olivarez High School) at the Ateneo High School, so he didn’t get to go, but Ate Beng was with us (and as a result is in most of the pictures 
We started from East to west, beginning with the Children’s Park at the corner of Taft Ave. and Kalaw. We walked leisurely from the Relief Map of the Philippines and in through all the gardens, The Japanese Garden, the Orchidarium and Butterfly Pavilion, The Chinese Garden and the diorama of Rizal’s life and execution. Digital camera had two sets of batteries (quick advice: the Panasonic Oxyride double A batteries last longer than the Eveready Alkaline e and is cheaper by almost 10 pesos) and so we took as many pictures as we could (there’s no telling when Mayor Lim might think of applying his business acumen on the park — good thing I took pictures of Baywalk when Sam and I were there two years ago).
Maia enjoyed the children’s park best, she would have stayed there the entire day if we had let her. But there was so much to see and do. By the time we had crossed over to the twin tamaraws Maia had turned her attention on the ambient vendors with the inflatable power rangers. Of course we had to get her one. We wanted to end the day watching the sun set at the Boardwalk, but we found that it had been closed to public access while a massive construction was being undertaken.
We had drinks at one of the old harbor restaurants, a stone’s throw away from the US Embassy’s bay side. After which we decided to cut the day short early in the afternoon and take a taxi home. I enjoyed every bit of the day perhaps almost as much as Maia did, and perhaps the next trip out we can be more adventurous and head out to Corregidor.
But that’s for another weekend.
About Me
