What Time Is It

There was this guy who was a regular guy who lived a regular life
Got up 7:30 every morning
Had the same breakfast
Kissed the same wife goodbye every morning
Went to the same office
Came home Monday through Friday
On Saturdays, he played with the children
Did handywork around the house
Sundays, he took the family out on the station wagon to the suburbs
And there, they looked at the houses and the trees, the billboards,
the gasoline stations, and the railroad crossings
And his life might have gone on like this forever
Except one night, something strange happened to him
You see, he went to bed at 10:30
And some of his friends stayed up later
And one of them, closing up a place that closed at two in the morning,
decided to call this «regular liver»
And said, «What time is it?», on the telephone
When he woke up and he said, «Who's this? Who’s this? It’s, it’s,
it’s two o’clock in the morning, it’s no time to call. Bye!»
But the practical joker called every night, two o’clock in the morning
He did this for two weeks
Friend said, «Who is it? Stop!»
Finally, after two weeks, the practical joker lost interest in the joke and did
stop
Then came two o’clock and the phone didn’t ring
So he woke up
«Why isn’t the phone ringing?»
He discovered that the only way that he could go back to sleep was to say, «What time is it?»
Look at his watch and say, «two o’clock»
And he could sleep
He did this a couple of nights until he began to think:
«It's two o’clock where I am
What time is it in New York? Or in Hollywood?
Or in London? Or Hong Kong? And Cairo?»
He didn’t know
So the next day, he went out and he bought himself some clocks
He got clocks from all over and he put them all over the walls
And the time was there
He knew what time it was everywhere that counted
And this made him feel comfortable
He became so interested in time that he got little egg timers and gave them
away as presents
He read about time in, in books
Sidereal time: time way out in the universe
He knew what time it was on Arcturus and the Pleiades and the Milky Way
One night, though, at two o’clock in the morning, the light wouldn’t go on;
the fuse had blown
But suddenly, he realized he knew what time it was without even looking
Not only in the important cities of this world, but in the entire universe
And naturally, began to brag a little the next day
He told people, «I know what time it is»
And they tested him and he did know
The Administration had changed at this particular time and they wanted to save
money
So they got rid of all their astronomers, all their telescopes, their weights
and measures
And they put this man in Washington in a little room
Where he sits to this day, simply saying:
«BEEP. The time now is…»