What could be simpler? You are arrested and thrown into solitary. You know you will lose track of the days so you may a note on the wall, maybe with a little blood or something of the current day and time. You note each succeeding day, too. You have a little calendar. Pretty straightforward.
Calendars are tricky. They are simple and they aren’t. There are at least nine widely used calendar systems today. Plus several more that have been shelved, such as the one instituted by the French during their revolution.
In 1965, I was required to take a 1 credit course with the other fellows on NDEA scholarships. The idea was to learn to use Fortran, a computer language. None of us had seen a computer but we knew it was an advanced machine. The one we got to use had something like a memory of 32K, so small that probably no object with memory today has one that little. Early on, we got a tour of the computer center where we would deposit our programs for the operator to run on the computer, big decks of punched cards with one command per card. Nobody cared what the problem was. The course was to be about using Fortran. The instructor made it simple. He wanted to be able to give us two dates and have our program state the number of days between them.
Researching the problem, we discovered that advisors to the Pope informed him several centuries back that the calendar of the day was out of whack and needed to be adjusted. He declared that such and such a day would officially be followed by a day about two weeks into the future. There were riots. People wanted their days back. We tried to take that change into consideration. Eventually, we demonstrated enough knowledge and impatience that after three years running, we got our 1 credit. We never tried to deal with millennia before the common era and such.
Lynn and I did read “Waiting for the Weekend” by Witold Rybczynski, a versatile professor of architecture. He gives some sense of the struggle to get people to stop rising with the sun and come to work at the appointed hour during the Industrial Revolution.
I thought my email program was for sending and receiving emails until I considered switching to the free Mozilla email called Thunderbird. Then, I realized that Lynn and I used the calendar to remind us of events and appointments. I tried using the free but rather aggressive Google calendar but we are still using our standby. Retirement brings lots of freedom and choices but that puts more strain than ever on the calendar since one never knows what tomorrow is scheduled for without looking it up.
