Geophysics Proves I Am Not Late, The Earth Is Simply Slow

My shift manager looks at the clock when I walk into a room. The barista making my flat white taps his wrist. I have spent years enduring this treatment. But today I am vindicated by gravitational friction. Geophysics has proven what I knew in primary school. Time is loose. My arrival forty-two minutes after the staff meeting began is entirely the fault of the Earth’s mantle.

The length of an Earth day is not exactly twenty-four hours. It fluctuates. A solid iron core sits deep underground and drags against the rock above it. This slows the rotation of the entire globe down by a few milliseconds. It is an airtight geological reason for my inability to arrive on schedule. You can’t expect me to respect a timetable when the ground beneath my shoes refuses to do the same.

So it is unreasonable for my direct line manager, Senior Temporal Enforcer Brenda Flinch, to hand me a written warning about punctuality. We live on a wobbly rock hurtling through a vacuum. She expects me to guarantee my presence at a morning presentation. I cannot do that while the foundation of timekeeping is actively warped by iron sloshing in the abyss. The planet refuses to spin on time. I refuse to arrive on time.

“A millisecond lost in the mantle is easily a two-hour delay in my kitchen.” — Dr. Pat Hypothesis, amateur geophysicist and professional slacker

I am drafting appeals for my last four disciplinary hearings. I will submit a binder of documentation to the department head on Thursday. The paperwork outlines how accumulated millisecond delays over the last decade mathematically explain my return from lunch at ten past three. My tardiness is a subconscious attunement to shifting geology. Just operating on inner core time.

People point out that a few milliseconds a day does not add up to missing half a working week. They simply don’t understand subterranean gravity. A millisecond lost in the Earth’s mantle translates to a two-hour delay in my galley kitchen. Gravitational fluctuations disrupt the circuitry in my digital alarm clock. This creates a localized dilation field that physically pins me to the mattress.

Office clocks need to be removed and replaced with seismographs. We have to adjust our expectations to the geology. A meeting should not start at an arbitrary number on a screen. It should start when the tectonic plates settle. If the inner core drags its heels on a Tuesday morning, Tuesday morning happens later.

Fighting the Earth is pure arrogance. We should embrace the lethargy of the mantle. The next time Brenda demands to know why a project deadline was ignored, I will just point at the linoleum floor. The planet is taking its time. I intend to do the same.