Have you ever noticed that when you ask a man to take out the trash, that his answer will most likely be something like, “In a minute” or “I’ll get to it” or “Sure thing honey”. Which, by the way, really means one of the first two answers, he’s just learned to appease his significant other with a positive response. Men seem to run on their own time zone. Sure, if there is a sports event televised at a certain time, they can adjust their schedules. But real life scenarios don’t seem to play into that. Have you ever wondered why?

Being engaged to a sports fanatic who lives, breathes, watches, writes about and works on sports all day every day, I am learning a lot about the proverbial “stronger sex”. In my haste to start a kick-your-butt Boom Blox session, I asked how much more of the Ole Miss versus Wake Forest game was left. He says, “Oh, only 12 seconds”.

And then it hit me. It’s trivial, and won’t be amounted to any sort of gender comprehension breakthrough, but it’s something. 12 seconds to any normal person sounds like it’d be over in an instant.

But then I reasoned with myself. This is football. And being the worst ‘pretend timed’ sporting event in the nation, 12 seconds could easily be more like 12 minutes. Men are growing accustomed to the fact that time on the clock isn’t really elapsed time, it’s slow motion time. There is always room for a time out, a commercial, a sponsor’s message.

So next time you ask your brother, boyfriend, husband, son or otherwise male related species to do a time related task, translate it into sports time. If we want it done in ten minutes on the sports clock, maybe we need to cut our time by a “sporting allowance percentage” and readjust.

For the fellow Einstein lovers out there, let’s make this a formula you can use. Male Standard Time (MST) = desired time (DT) multiplied by the sporting allowance percentage (SAP=5).

 MST=DT*SAP

So if DT=15 minutes, MST= 45 minutes. That’s how long it would really take, at a minimum! Can’t wait that long!??! Convert your time to their time zone!

Start with your DT and divide by the SAP to get the sporting allotment time (SAT).

DT / SAP = SAT

If you tell them to get it done in 3 minutes, it will really take them 15 minutes. Perfect!

But, continuing with the Einstein theme, what is time? If the present becomes the past while the future becomes the present, then is there really a present? Chew on that one awhile. Maybe figuring out men is easier!

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