Las Vegas marks time to its own steady beat

Las Vegas is a town created on the notion of taking every natural or man-made obstacle in its path and crushing it like a Hummer saying "Howdy" to a one-legged jackrabbit.

Torrid heat. A lack of water. Even, cosmically enough, time itself.

Las Vegas always has had an uneasy, at times adversarial, relationship with time. We've blurred the line between night and day, subsist in an economy in which many workers never have a work "day" per se, and even today do all we can to make free-spending tourists forget whatever the clock might say.

It's all so ... unnatural. And, notes Anthony Curtis, founder of Huntington Press and publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor, pretty much par for the course.

"The very first thing Las Vegas is trying to do to its customers is unnatural, which is to get them to part with their money," he explains.

So, given that, what's a little deliberate chronological confusion among friends? Dr. Charles McPherson, director of the Regional Center for Sleep Disorders at Sunrise Hospital, says even his own perception of time has been altered for having lived here for about 18 years.

"When you travel to another city and want to go to dinner, and it's 9:30 at night and you go to a restaurant and they say, 'We're closing,' you get kind of upset -- like, 'Why are you closing?' " McPherson says.

Matthew White, an associate professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that Las Vegas' heavy reliance on tourism and travel does "inherently change the relationship of time."

Keeping track of the time is vital in business and commerce. But, in a resort-based economy, White says, a tourist's "need to run your life by the clock is greatly minimized, and I think people in travel and tourism have long realized that they can make their clients and customers happier by not emphasizing (time)."

After all, White adds, "when I take a vacation, the first thing I do is take off my watch and leave it in the hotel room."

Las Vegas' love-hate relationship with time can be encapsulated in the nugget of common folk wisdom that holds that casinos, by design, have no clocks.

Partly true, Curtis says. "Generally speaking, they try to keep clocks out of sight. They don't want you to know it's time to go home."

But, he continues, "inside of casinos, it's really easy to locate the time if you know where to look."

According to Curtis, clocks almost always can be found in sports books, on parking validation machines, in cashiers' cages and near the podiums in table game pits.

Another possible exhibit in the case of Las Vegas versus Time: Why we're in the Pacific, instead of the more reasonable Mountain, time zone.

This one does require a bit of history, though. According to White -- who has studied the economic aspects of time zones -- until the 1880s, every town in the country kept its own time. Someone -- a town official or amateur astronomer, perhaps -- would note when the sun seemed to be directly overhead, deemed that noon and set the town's main clock accordingly.

Problem was, White notes, times -- not just hours, but minutes -- varied from town to town, to the point where we were literally a land of 800 time zones in 800 cities.

Surprisingly, it was railroad companies, and not the government, that imposed order on this chronological chaos. Their officials developed a standardized time map and, White writes, "on a single day on 1883," adopted the four continental time zones we use today.

Among the geographic features the railroads used to delineate time zones was the Colorado River as it ran between Arizona and California, White says.

When Congress codified the railroad time zone system in 1918, it decided to follow the Utah-Nevada border which, "is just about where it should be from a geographical standpoint," White says.

The result: Californians -- a sizable segment of Las Vegas' incoming tourist pie -- don't have to change their watches when they arrive in or depart Las Vegas.

(By the way, White notes: That 1918 federal legislation also created Daylight Saving Time -- we marked it this year at 2 a.m. today -- to reduce fuel consumption during the years of World War I.)

Here's another way in which Las Vegas daily does battle with time: We probably have the largest round-the-clock workforce in the world. Curtis even now remains amazed at how many cars he sees in bar parking lots at 1:30 or 2 in the morning, as casino workers end their shifts.

Some casino employees, he adds, may well live "their whole life in the dark, and, for them, time is kind of distorted."

And, for them, time can be a more literal enemy. Thanks to the nature of its workforce, there are, McPherson says, "a lot of sleepy people, I think, in our town."

The problem, according to McPherson, is that "our biological clocks, no matter how hard we try, really have a hard time shifting to being awake at night and asleep during the day."

That's because of "the combination of sunlight that occurs every day, which is how our internal clock resets and stays current, and, obviously, all of the other social cues and activities that are going on every day that keep us from shifting to a night work schedule," he says.

That means night shift workers, or split shift workers, can have trouble sleeping as well or as long as their daylight, single-shift co-workers. A lack of sleep, or an erratic sleep schedule, also can make it difficult to concentrate and lead to reduced cognitive skills, McPherson says.

But what's really surprising about Las Vegas' ongoing attempt to shape time to its own ends is that, like a good magic act or a well-produced show, the city makes it look so easy. Truth be told, says David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, this is a more time-conscious city than it appears to be at first glance.

The "perception" may be that Las Vegas is blithe about time, Schwartz says, "but I think the reality is time is very important, especially when you look at all of the infrastructure we have for the shows and for restaurants."

"If you expect a shipment of fresh fish on the four o'clock plane for dinner, it better be here at 4 and not 8," he says, and if a show is supposed to begin at 9:30, it had better.

And, Schwartz adds, "think of the logistics of making 5,000 beds in 3,000 motel rooms. You've got to know when those beds are done."

Curtis notes, too, that awareness of time is vital to the gaming industry. For example, he says, time and motion studies examine the relationship between how many hands a dealer can deal over a specific period of time and how much money is bet over that time.

"So, OK, we suppress time and we suppress the perception of or knowledge that time even exists to tourists," Curtis says. "But behind the scenes, it's extremely important in the business that makes Las Vegas run."

Schwartz agrees.

"I think Las Vegas, in the big sense, does (time) better than anybody else," he says, marveling at how good the city is in "making things seem effortless, making things seem like there is no sense of time."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0280.