Before my trip to Latin America it had been years since I’d worn a watch. My grandfather gave me one for Christmas six years ago, and when it broke beyond repair I never replaced it. It’s not that I became “anti-watch,” it’s just that I didn’t really need one. In my last job I could tell you what second of what minute of what hour it was any day of the week. I’d often be leading one meeting, virtually participating in another via IM, all while refreshing my email to see what I was missing. I was excruciatingly aware of time, or moreover, the lack of it.
So it was ironic that in preparation for my trip to Mexico the first thing I bought was a watch. Without my iPhone and Outlook, how else would I anchor a day? Without an alarm, how would I wake up? What if I missed a bus?
I settled on an Ironman watch. Nothing fancy, but it was waterproof, good for the outdoors, and equipped with multiple alarms. It looked so good in the box, but once I got it out, I realized it needed to be set. I felt a familiar pang: instructions.
It may as well have been a subway map, an apple pie recipe , or a welcome screen to TurboTax — my anxiety about reading instructions always feels the same. And this watch had three pages worth, in small print. So I did what I’ve done many times before. I went to my sister’s house, delivered the goods, and let her do her magic.
I think my sister used to doubt my total lack of ability to read a set of instructions. She probably thought I was just lazy, and happier to let her take care of it. That is, until the time she came home to our apartment and found me near tears, screwdriver in hand, mumbling about a Home Depot shelving conspiracy. I had spent three hours trying to assemble a small two-shelf unit, and had somehow managed to do the entire thing both inside out and backwards. So now, when I show up at her doorstep toting mechanical merchandise, she looks at me with the concerned gaze of a mother who finds her child in a closet eating Play Doh, and gently takes it from my hand.
When she finished setting the watch she said, “You realize you’re going to be traveling through lots of different time zones, right?”
“Duh,” I replied, having completely forgotten that fact.
“You’re going to need to keep these,” she said, handing me back the instructions. But before she did, she attached a yellow sticky note across which she wrote in bold, capital letters: “FIND A NICE MAN TO HELP YOU.”
Find a nice man to help me?! Over my dead body.
So I showed her. For the first several weeks I just left my watch on Chicago time. I told people it was because I wanted to feel close to home, but the real reason was that the one time I tried to fix it, I accidentally set an alarm for 3 am. Not exactly good houseguest etiquette, especially in a small apartment with thin walls. After that I opted to leave the thing alone, and just did the math myself.
When I got to Argentina this got more complicated; now it was three hour time change. I missed a bus due to my Ironman time warp, and I realized it was time to teach myself how to master the dot matrix display. So I sat down with a glass of Malbec, asked the instructions to be nice to me, and surprisingly enough, within a single glass of wine, I figured it out.
But despite my feat over the sticky note, winning was not sweet satisfaction. Previously, I only had a general sense of time, and each time I paused to take a guess at it, I was reminded that it was on my side. I had ten weeks to travel with no particular destination. If a bus was late, I wouldn’t sweat it: my time was the chronological version of Monopoly money.
But the moment I adjusted my watch, I inadvertently adjusted my expectations. And there’s nothing worse than American expectations about time when you’re in Argentina. (I once had a waiter get visibly irritated when, after waiting for 40 minutes, I asked for a menu.) As soon as I began expecting things to be on time they became dramatically less fun. So I stopped using my watch altogether– I only took it out at night to set my alarm, and let it sleep on my nightstand.
Now that I’m back in Chicago I’m still trying to take things slowly. If only time were money. Then I’d be rich! But each day that goes by brings me closer to a familiar routine: places to go, things to do, people to see. And as much as I’m enjoying “retirement,” I’m continually reminded that it’s time to find a job. Thing is, I’m not sure what that is yet. What I do know is that I’m not ready to start losing my hair from stress again.
I think the answer is that I’ll need to clock-in for myself– start my own business. Maybe I’ll just start selling gum on public transportation. That seemed to be a huge enterprise in Mexico. Or maybe I could export pens to Latin America, where there is a definitive shortage. When I launch my pen empire children won’t need to sell them on the street, banks will have them for patrons to use, and there will be such abundance that even hotels will even leave one for you in your room. The world will be a better, inkier place, and I will make millions!
If that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll get lucky and find a patron who wants to fund my disasters. I’ll just sit here and wait patiently, wearing my yellow sticky note: “LOOKING FOR A NICE MAN TO HELP ME OUT.”
