Second (To None)

By...Erik Schuman

***BEFORE you read any further – STOP! Use your “Stopwatch” function on your phone and time how long it takes to read this – then post the time below***

One second. One-sixtieth of a minute or slightly more than 1%. The same as the fat content in the milk I use every morning for my cereal. For the record my favorite cereal is Kellogg’s Crispix unless I want something awful and full of sugar in which case I go for Frosted Flakes or Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch (I blame my sister Kathy for this since growing up she always made sure we had sugary cereals in the house...and I know once she reads this she will be calling me and chewing me out for saying this – even though it is true and she knows it).

Did you know you can blink your eyes at least three times in a single second? Unless you are an attractive woman looking at me and in that case you will blink your eyes three times...per day (Must be all of that Mascara affecting her eyes and gluing them shut, right?).

How fast is one second? Judge for yourself. This YouTube video shows one second of all 236 episodes of “Friends.”: 

We all know there are 60 seconds in a minute. There are 3600 seconds in an hour and 86,400 per day. This year there will be 31,622,400 seconds with non-Leap Year’s having “only” 31,536,000 seconds. If you made one penny per second for the entire year you would make over $315,000 and over $1.25 Million for every four-years of a single Presidential term.

While that sounds impressive, and it is, compared to Jeff Bezos, it is not. Bezos makes around $2,500. PER SECOND! For Amazon workers making $18 an hour they make one-half-of-a-cent per second. They would need to work half-a-million (500,000) seconds to make what Bezos makes in ONE! That computes to 8,333 minutes, almost 139 hours or just under three-and-a-half weeks working a full 40 hours. How much would Bezos make in that same 139 hours? How about almost $21. MILLION! And keep in mind that 139 hours would take almost 588 hours when all 24 hours are taken into effect but while they are not working Bezos is still making money. That 588 hours generates Bezos over $88 Million. I want to make it perfectly clear I am not taking a shot at Bezos but just trying to show how the value of a second differs from person-to-person.

If you think Bezos making $2500 per second is a lot how about getting paid almost $187,000! FOX charged $5.6 Million for a 30-second ad in the most recent Super Bowl and that came out to $186,666 per second. Or almost 75 times what Bezos makes (I am starting up a GoFundMe page for him to help him overcome this obstacle and help him pay his bills).

There have been 63,714,643,200 seconds (Or less than HALF of what Bezos is worth, pre-divorce, that is, although he is worth more than that even post-divorce) from the Year “0-AD” through 2019. In trying to see if I could come up with what was the most valuable second ever there were a few to choose from: The “Big Bang” (NOT the TV show but the actual BB) that allegedly created the planet was one. The signing of the Versailles Treaty ending World War I also came up. But in all cases while the actual second these took place was important the actual single second any of these took place was not recorded.

Maybe our own birth would be? But while all of us know what day we were born few know the hour and minute (I do) and I doubt we know the exact second since that is never put on a birth certificate. It’s not like parents of a newborn have a lot of time to mark those kinds of things at that moment.

We all remember what happened on 9/11/2001 and while we know it happened in the morning, can anyone outside of New York City recall the exact minute either plane hit the Twin Towers, let alone second? Or the exact time JFK was assassinated. We know it took place in Dallas but how many can tell me the exact minute it happened? Or second? I can tell you the Los Angeles Kings won the 2012 Stanley Cup on Monday, June 11, 2012 by beating the New Jersey Devils 6-1. I know because I still tear up to this day thinking about it. I know it happened before 8pm but even though I counted down the last few seconds I can’t tell you the exact second the clock struck 0:00 and 45-years of frustration was exorcised (Stanley Cup #2 was won on Friday, June 13, 2014 just before 10pm - but the exact minute or second it happened – Nope!).

Think about how important one second is in a movie. How many times has the bomb been defused with more than five seconds left? ZERO! Usually it takes place one second before it explodes blowing everyone to smithereens.

In an average year there are 56 Million deaths worldwide. That comes out to around 1.80 deaths PER SECOND or 18 every 10 seconds although this year that number might be higher and we know why. Think about how many people have died while you read this.

When it comes to sports there have been championships lost by teams that might have actually won if they only had a few more seconds left on the clock. For some sports it isn’t seconds that matter but fractions of a second. A 100-meter dash is never decided by more than a second unless everyone, but the winner, gets lost. Since the race is run in a straight line that never happens unless Monty Python has anything to do with it and then that very well might happen as we see here:

At the Olympics, events like the Luge, Bobsled and Skiing events are usually determined not by tenths-of-a-second but hundreds-of-a-second. American Bill Johnson winning the Downhill by 0.46 seconds at the 1984 Olympics is almost a rout by those standards:

So, while one second might seem like an insignificant measure of time since they pass by so quickly and there are so many per day let alone year - it is anything but!

***STOP the Stopwatch now! How many SECONDS did it take for you to read this? Take those SECONDS and multiply it by $2,500 and that is how much money Jeff Bezos made while you read this (If it will make things easier multiply the minutes by $150,000 since he makes that every minute). If you so desire please post your time/amount in the comments section below. Unless you cannot stomach how big of a number that is because even if it only took 2 minutes that is $300,000 or what it will take most Americans a good 5-6 years to make (if not longer – assuming they have a job and right now that is not a given assumption).***