Time travel...has anyone seen my 10 lost hours?

On September 16, 1985, 24 years ago, I started working here in Southern California after driving my one week old Toyota SR5 long bed blue pickup truck and towing a 5' x 10' UHaul cargo trailer which contained all of my worldly possessions all the way from Tennessee. During that summer I had been working two jobs, one converting an analog inventory system into a digital one at the Dupont plant in a town called Old Hickory in Tennessee, and the other programming sales computers for the People Express airline. Two and a half months of working two jobs for 16 hours a day had taken it's toll and motivated me to go job hunting for a better future. The job market for engineers on that year had been a tough one, making the task of getting a descent job pretty much like having a third job. I applied to 98 different engineering jobs all around the United States and had promised myself that the first one to make me a reasonable offer would get me instantly. I still have a log book in which I kept track of everywhere to which I sent a resumé, any letters that they sent back, and any interviews that were offered. Out of the 98 tries, only two made the effort to hire me. The first letter that arrived with good news was from the job I currently and since have held here in California. The other one was an even better offer, but I had already accepted the previous one and felt committed to my first choice. I have been fortunate enough that even though budget cuts have come and gone, reduction in force once took almost half of the people working at my location on the street, and our military command has been on base closure lists twice, God has blessed me with never having to do the job hunting ordeal again. For this I am extremely thankful.

Throughout the years, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have moved around within the system and tried my hand at least five different jobs. My current position is not only rewarding in many ways, the people that I work with are great too. I have learned that who you work with is more important than what you do for a living. Spend enough time with miserable people and I guarantee you that the best paying job in the world will turn out to be a real drag. When the opposite is true, the most challenging job in the world can actually be kind of fun when you are in good company. I use the term "fun" relatively loosely because what might be fun for me could be incredibly not fun for you. Either way, although people like to describe themselves by what they do for a living, instead I rather describe myself by how I do things for a living. It just makes more sense to me.

Today, as I write this post, I just finished packing my bags to head out tomorrow on a trip to Japan to do my job. Even though there is a certain degree of thrill involved in heading to somewhere new to challenge myself in my career, I can't help but feel a little bit cheated after trying to figure out my travel schedule and the hours it will take me to get there and back. I know this is going to sound a bit confusing, but try to keep up. I will be flying on a direct flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo that will take me almost twelve hours to get there. However, on the way back the return flight is also a non-stop flight but it will only take nine and a half hours to reach Los Angeles. I am assuming this time difference has something to do with different airplane speeds and whether we are flying in the direction the earth is rotating or opposite to it. I am going to get to the bottom of this when I have some time to research it, so don't worry, this is going to come up again in another post...hahaha!

The time cheating does not end there. Another confusing fact is that even though I depart Los Angeles on Saturday at 12:50 p.m. and the flight is 11 hours and 40 minutes long, I actually lose almost 16 hours of my life by the time I land in Tokyo at 4:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon. What's up with that? This would not be so confusing if on my return flight I would get it all back. Strangely enough I will leave Tokyo after completing my job a week later and even though my flight departs on Saturday at 4:00 p.m., after flying for almost ten hours when finally arrive in Los Angeles it will be 10:00 a.m. the same day. According to my calculations this means that I will arrive 6 hours before I departed. So where are the other remaining 10 hours from the 16 I lost in the first place? There is a certain degree of madness in all of this flying around a planet that is moving while you are trying to reach your final destination. Personally I am a bit more concerned about who is going to pay for those 10 missing hours of my life...hahaha!

Thank you for putting up with my nonsense. I hope you all have a wonderful next week. I am pretty certain that I am not going to be able to make any posts while I am gone, but I promise to bring you something nice back with me to share. If you start feeling withdrawals from not having some of my nutty stuff to read, my advice is to go back and read some of my earlier posts and find something to share with me in a comment or email. All of you have been extremely wonderful guests and I appreciate your advice, comments, positive thoughts, and more than anything your prayers. I can definitely use them while I am on travel since I will not be able to interact with my son and just being so incommunicado scares the crap out of me sometimes. I have to believe that God will take care of him even better than I do when I am home...right?

Dad