Some months ago my Android phone mysteriously shifted two hours forward. At first I simply marveled at this crazy turn of events. How could a phone that got its time from the internet possibly get the time wrong?
After several days I navigated to the phone’s settings to see what was up, and whether I could fix it. At which point I discovered that my phone thought that I was in Greenland. I looked on the Web, searching high and low for a clue, but nowhere could I find even a description of these symptoms, let alone a solution.
I have never been to Greenland, and if you’d asked me before this incident, I would have had no idea that Greenland time is two hours ahead of New York time. But there it was. And apparently, there I was. According to my Android operating system, the phone and I were hanging around somewhere between Kujalleq and Qaasuitsup.
And no matter what I did, no matter how I tweaked the settings, no matter how often I rebooted, my phone stayed stubbornly on Greenland time.
I was curious to see what would happen when I went to other time zones, and I soon found out. All along the West Coast, I was to discover, from San Diego to Vancouver and all points between, I was still on Greenland time. Which meant that in order to figure out what the local time was, I now needed to subtract five hours from the time on my phone.
This mysterious state of affairs continued on, in its oddly stubborn way, until just this morning. I happened to turn my phone off and then on again, something I’ve done many times in recent months. But this time it snapped back to New York time.
Apparently I have been released from my Greenlandic bonds. I am now once again a citizen of the world, free to be a New Yorker when in New York, a Los Angeleno when in Los Angeles, and a Portlandian when in Portland.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Greenland.