The Hour · Debug Season · Pulse Beat
There was nothing special about 2:17 in the morning. He checked the cron table, the scheduler, the backup tool, the jobs he had written and the ones the hosting company ran on its own. Nothing was…
There was nothing special about 2:17 in the morning.
He checked the cron table, the scheduler, the backup tool, the jobs he had written and the ones the hosting company ran on its own. Nothing was scheduled for 2:17. It was an odd minute, between the hourly and the half-hourly runs.
He went to bed at four, and lay on his back, listening to the fridge, and thought about odd minutes.
A minute is a coincidence of two clocks. The server kept time in UTC. The phones in the world kept time in the places where their owners lived. Somewhere between the two was a conversion, written eight months earlier by himself, in a rush, on a Sunday, to make the sync agree about which page was newest.
Seventeen minutes past two. He sat bolt upright. India was five and a half hours ahead of UTC. A quarter past eight, plus the half hour, minus... He scrambled for the laptop. The numbers did not fit, and then, suddenly, with a lurch like a lift starting, they did.