Chamorro Standard Time

Here’s something for you: If you say that we’re living on Chamorro Standard Time, you’re right.

In fact, it’s a federal regulation.

Code citations are, alas, not an element of any journalism guides on my shelf, but I think the way to refer to the regulation at hand is “49 C.F.R. 71.14.”

Anyway, the regulation specifies a “Chamorro standard time zone,” which includes “the Island of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.”

Neat, huh? I think you can win some bar bets with that one. That’s why I’m your buddy.

Still, Chamorro time is hardly a universal handle for this zone. My watch refers to this time zone as “SYD,” for Sydney, since it specifies zones by whatever large city can be associated with it.

So when it comes to describing our time zone to outsiders, saying “Chamorro Standard Time” sometimes needs some more explanation to go with it.

Most folks I know simply say “Saipan time” or “Guam time,” but you can mix and match as you wish.

If we want to specify just where the Chamorro standard time zone really is, we can say it a few ways.

My first choice would be: “Chamorro Standard Time is GMT + 10.”

A second way: “Chamorro Standard Time is Tokyo time + 1.”

I guess there is some ambiguity in this, since the numbers (“10” or “1”) don’t have units attached. That they stand for hours is such a common convention I’m happy with not belaboring it.

But if someone wanted to say “GMT + 10 hours,” or “Tokyo time plus 1 hour,” then, well, why not? Me, I’m just not that innately helpful.

Anyway, the third way: “Chamorro Standard Time is the same time zone as Sydney, Australia,” which is a little awkward in phrasing but it gets the point across.

Tokyo and Sydney work as references because, like Saipan, neither one tangles with daylight savings time. Of course, that can always change.

Ah, but GMT, Greenwich Mean Time, won’t change on that note. This is the best reference to use if you’re messing with time zones. There’s a lot of important history in this, and Greenwich, England is famous because it serves as the reference point for navigation and time all over the world.

But I guess this history is being forgotten now, since satellites do our navigating, and since people who work in offices don’t have to understand the physical layout of the planet. So why not take a look at this stuff now? A lot of people these days are never exposed to it.

The basic navigation concept goes like so: It’s a lot like plotting a point on a graph. On a graph, you have an X-axis and a Y-axis. On the earth, the X-axis is the equator. And the Y-axis is the Prime Meridian, which runs through Greenwich.

Why does Greenwich get the honor of being such an important reference? Well, in the 1700s, the British, very much a sea-faring power, invented a clock that could be taken to sea and that was accurate enough to enable them to reckon their longitude. This was a very big deal. So the reference line for longitude, known as the Prime Meridian, was anchored at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

So, just as the equator is zero degrees latitude, the Prime Meridian is zero degrees longitude.

This gig had a brief flash of attention in pop-culture when a movie called Longitude hit the scene in 1990. It’s a historical drama about the trials and tribulations of clockmaker John Harrison, who invented the necessary clock for navigation, but, for a long time, the high mucky-mucks screwed him out of his reward money. Well, if nothing else, it just goes to show you that you can’t trust men in powdered wigs who snort tobacco clippings.

Moving along here, time zones are a function of longitude (until governments need to twist them around to conform to various boundaries), and that’s why Greenwich Mean Time is the world’s standard reference for time and time zones. Military operations and airline dispatching, for example, are done on GMT.

In fact, the military has the cleanest terminology of all, calling GMT “Zulu” time, or just plain “Z” time. Fast to write, fast to say.

By contrast, the most modern term is the grandiosely awkward “UTC,” for Universal Coordinated Time, which is the atomic-clock based refinement of GMT. Well, blah-di-blah-blah.

I mean, let’s be serious here: universal? Meaning all the creatures in the entire universe have their VCRs set to this? Maybe that explains all those alien probings; they’ve come to reset the blinking 12:00 on their coffee makers and had really strange notions about where to plug them in.

Well, I’m sticking with GMT. So: Chamorro Standard Time is GMT + 10.

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