This list was inspired by the song "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere," which came on at a bar a few weeks ago. It's a country tune sung by Alan Jackson (of South Park's "Ladder to Heaven" fame) with help from Jimmy Buffett. In case you are not familiar, here you go:
I guess I had heard the song before, but until I heard it again just recently, I had never really registered its message. Let me start by saying that I understand the sentiment. The person singing this song is working some unspecified, but presumably gruelling, job. His boss has told him thath he needs to work overtime. He is understandably frustrated and wishes to start drinking immediately. Now, I'm a teacher - which means that I do not have to worry about the hot sun bearing down on me as I work, nor am I paid by the hour. For that matter, at five o'clock I have been officially off work for nearly three hours - so the specific time doesn't mean as much to me as it does to the speaker. But I get the point: sometimes I, too, want to ditch work and responsibility in favor of a local tavern.
So the problem here isn't with the message - it's with the way it's expressed, which displays a fundamental lack of understanding of how the way time zones work. At most times of day - in fact, for fifty-nine minutes of each hour - the title of the song just isn't true. When it is 6:01 here, it is 5:01 in Chicago, 4:01 in Denver, 3:01 in Seattle and 5:00 nowhere.
Surely Alan Jackson knows this, right? Maybe he just means it in the way that people mean when they ask, "Are you twenty-one?" as a stand-in for "Are you able to drink alcohol legally?" I am willing to accept this, and yet even that is a little bit annoying. Every time I'm asked "Are you twenty-one?" - with surprising frequency, given that I am much closer to thirty - I understand the question as a lazy man's version of, "Are you at least twenty-one?" Just like I have to understand that this song should be titled, "It's At Least Five O'Clock Somewhere." This admittedly isn't as catchy - but then who wants to drink with a guy who wants to drink with a guy who thinks that at 11:24 AM there is some weird, alternate world where it's exactly 5:00?
