As early as the late Twentieth Century, there was a move underway to coordinate the world’s major governments and corporations with the International Atomic Clock (IAC).  In short, there was a move underway to establish a standard world time that everybody everywhere would be coordinated with.  There were several agreeable reasons, though none that was exceeding compelling, why doing so would be a good idea.  Most dealt with commerce, and communications, and communications about commerce.   However, even then there were those who were alarmed that doing such a thing would cause something potentially bad, but they really weren’t quite sure what that might be.  Understandably, their cries were ignored.

Though many individuals and companies had been using the IAC for their time standards since its inception in the mid-20^th Century, it was in late 2031 that Tell-All, the world’s largest telecommunication provider, adopted the IAC as the standard for all of its communication devices.  Soon, all handheld communication devices everywhere, as well as all computers, were linked to the IAC.  Therefore, whatever time you had on your phone was the exact time that everybody else in the world saw, down to the nanosecond.  Except, of course, for the differences in time zones.

Because everybody knew that the time on their cell phone was absolutely right, that became the world standard for the increasingly few clocks that had still not been linked to the IAC.  Even clocks on such mundane appliances  as coffeemakers and microwave ovens had been linked to the IAC.  And whenever there was a discrepancy between the IAC and an unlinked clock, it was always assumed that the IAC was the one that was correct, regardless of how much the unlinked clock might be off.

In the Spring of 2033… maybe… the most influential businessmen in the West were all approached by a man who was known simply as Kevin.  Kevin announced to these businessmen that he had control of the IAC.  In fact, he had been manipulating the world’s time for the past several years, slowing it down and speeding it up as he saw fit.  What Kevin offered to the highest bidder was the ability to control time.  It was the ability to stretch the work day out into twelve hours while the workers are thinking they’re only working eight, and then to make up the difference by shortening the nights.  There really would be a reason why the nights go by so fast, but these afternoons, man, do they drag on and on. 

Kevin further threatened that if they didn’t take him up on his generous offer he would shut down the IAC, and, consequently, every clock in the world.  Undoubtedly, everyone believed Kevin to be barking mad and refused to pay, but in a cordial manner, of course.  What followed was a relatively brief discourse in which Kevin insisted that he wasn’t bluffing, and the businessmen assured Kevin that neither were they, all the while both sides becoming increasingly less cordial, until finally, they called Kevin’s bluff.  If he bloody well wanted to shut off all the clocks in the world, then he best get to it.  So, much to their collective surprise, Kevin did.  Virtually every clock in the world either went blank or to flashing twelves, letting on that it no longer knew what time it was, and quite frankly, neither did you.  In fact, you truly could no longer say with any certainty what day of the week it actually was.

To be certain, there was quite a bit of chaos.  There were panicking and riots.  There was a bit of widespread mayhem where thousands of people lost their lives, and several major financial markets in the world lost all they had, too.  It was hard to tell, though, if all that happened were a direct result of Kevin, or just the sort of thing that happened on a regular basis in the world anyway.

Really, on the whole, not much changed at all, except everybody suddenly had a vivid lesson in relativity, the kind Einstein only dreamed of.  It didn’t take the officials long before somebody figured out what was probably fairly close to a second, and from there the rest was easy.  By then, however, everybody had lost all real respect for time, and the suffix “ish” became standard for any measurement of time that was required to be anywhere close to precise, and those that didn’t need to be at that level of precision were generally ignored altogether.  Birthdays were worried about a lot less.  People got less excited about anniversaries of any kind.  For the most part appointments became a question of eventually, showing up to work was more a matter of whenever, and going to lunch and actually coming back was pretty much “around then.”  Leaving work at the end of the day, however, remained spot on.

And Kevin?  He wasn’t hard to catch.  People who come up with schemes like that aren’t usually at University on athletic scholarships, so there wasn’t a whole lot of chasing that needed to be done.  And when he was caught, he was more than willing to make a deal.  He claimed he had wiped all the clocks clear but one – the one he still had.  And that’s probably why they let him go.  After all, they figured, it was probably punishment enough to be the only person in the whole world who truly knows what time it is, but nobody else cares.