15.1 Why Is Your Watch Set That Way?

One day in Minnesota years ago, I was hanging out in a cafe with a Tanzanian musician friend I’ll call Ali. One of Ali’s friends stopped by our table and started chatting with him, ending with asking what time it was. Ali looked down at his wristwatch and said, “It’s 3:15.”

The thing is, I could see his watch, and it didn’t say 3:15; it said 9:15, which was six hours off from the actual time. I had to ask, “Ali, why is your watch set six hours early?” “Oh,” he said, “that’s the way we do it where I come from. Tanzania is on the equator, so the sun rises at 6:00 a.m. every day of the year, and we start counting the hours from sunrise — 7:00 a.m. is ‘the first hour,’ 8:00 a.m. is ‘the second hour,’ etc., so we set our watches that way.”^[1] I asked him to remind me how long he’d been living in the USA, and he confirmed that it was more than five years. It was a revelatory moment for me, realizing that my friend looked at the world differently than I did, and he would rather do the mental calculation of adding six hours every time he looked at his watch than give up the system he grew up with.

It made me think of lines from the movie The Adventures of Milo and Otis, which my children were watching around that time (the early 1990s). The movie is about a talking cat named Milo who encounters a dog named Otis. Milo has apparently never seen a dog before, and says:

Milo: You’re a strange-looking cat.

Otis: Oh, I’m not a cat; I’m a dog.

Milo: All right, a dog, I understand…. But deep down inside, we’re all cats, right?

Sorry, Milo, but no: deep down we’re not all cats; there really are fundamental differences between creatures. Of course, it’s a fantasy film, and if it were two human beings bumping into each other, Milo could be justified in saying “deep down inside, we’re all humans, right?”, even if the person he’s encountering is from the opposite side of the planet and sets his watch differently. But it’s a question of how “deep down” you go: there are levels at which the differences are very real, and assuming the other person is just like you leads to trouble and misunderstanding. For example, Ali told me about an awkward encounter he’d just had with an American friend he hadn’t seen for a few years. When he bumped into her, he said joyously, “You’re looking fat!” He was confused by her offended reaction, since that would have been a compliment in the food-insecure part of Tanzania he was from — the equivalent of saying “You look healthy!”