Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Oct 26/01) - Time: the lumbering headmaster following our waking, working, eating and sleeping, rapping the knuckles with the cruel strap of alarm clocks or the back to work whistle. From this there is little chance of escape.

Norm McBride, customer service representative with the NWT Power Corporation sits at the controls of time. Here is where the control keeps electrical frequency at 60 cycles a second to ensure electrical clocks keep time with the rest of the world.

And here in Yellowknife the NWT Power Corporation controls this dictator with a twist of the dial.

This is not some Huxleyian dystopia, this is Yellowknife but NWT Power has the power.

"People don't realize what controllers can do with the time," says Norm McBride, customer service representative for NWT Power.

He says electrical clock time depends on frequency to keep time with the seconds.

NWT Power keeps electricity at a frequency of 60 cycles per second -- the norm.

But frequency can fluctuate and it's up to NWT Power employees to keep it stable. At any point in the day electrical clocks might be off by 30 seconds, says McBride.

Sitting at a control panel with a hundred esoteric buttons and dials, the controller balances electrical output with input to keep the frequency steady.

McBride says gold mines usually throw off the cycles with huge power surges every time the electrical motors kick in for rock lifts.

"If it goes down, the clocks slow down," says McBride. "We might get out a minute."

McBride says controllers use a GPS clock and the 11 p.m. beep on CBC Radio to ensure clocks and cycles follow time.

Before the fear hits. Before citizens of Yellowknife give up to the reality every aspect of life is controlled by dials and levers somewhere, there are those who claim clock time is not the only time.

Rev. Don Flumerfelt, of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church, says clock time is just one aspect of time. Flumerfelt said clock time--"chronos" in ancient Greek--marks out the mundane.

"But there is another word: Kairos which means the fullness of time," said Flumerfelt.

Kairos marks its passage through massive shifts in history -- Sept 11. In biblical terms, Kairos marks the point where the divine intersects with the mundane.

Natural time--freezing, thaw, harvest--called "hora" also pulses to its own rhythm.

"Former residents of Yellowknife talked about other means of marking time like the whistles at the mine," said Flumerfelt. "Or marking time when Giant Mine dynamites at 4:30 and the TV picture goes a little fuzzy. McBride said independent diesel generators in small communities often cause clocks to be off by two to three minutes either way.