5

      Jimmy Rafael in the meeting room. Five foot four of solid muscle. His shaved dome gleaming as if it had been massaged with olive oil. Maybe he did massage it with olive oil.

      ‘Morning, everyone! I don’t need to tell you we have no extra time so let’s get right to the point. I’ve known Dmitry for many years; we’ve shared a few important seconds in the Time Management Unit in the air force and in time engineering studies in the US. He’s going to talk about what he’s doing. About how saving a couple of seconds can change everything.’ I glanced at Ron. His eyes were making no comment, but to me they were saying, ‘Jimmy’s time talks: what a waste of time…’ I smiled to myself.

      ‘I am a certified time engineer and a senior traffic-light technician,’Dmitry began. He was very tall and was wearing a cheesecloth shirt of the kind you never saw at Time’s Arrow. ‘I work for a private consulting firm in Hadera. My role is to find dead seconds. This story is about how I have found seven superfluous seconds in Rabin Square.

      ‘I don’t need to describe the spot: a square surrounded by four roads from two to four lanes wide. Between one and four thousand cars use the square pretty much every hour of the day. My goal was to leave it as empty as possible, and specifically to relieve a permanent congestion at the corner of Ibn-Gvirol and Zeitlin streets.’

      He made a sketch of the intersection on the drawing board, wrote the street names, and marked the point of the jam. ‘A traffic-light cycle, meaning the time between one green light and the next, is between twenty-four and a hundred and twenty seconds. The seconds are divided meticulously between pedestrians, traffic in all directions and the gaps between. But, as every driver knows, not every direction receives the same time. Traffic-light technicians divide the time at every location according to need. Short greens in city centres are ten seconds long. The longer ones, in less stressed locations, usually take around eighty seconds out of a cycle of a hundred and twenty. In Rabin Square I discovered that the south-eastern corner had traffic lights which were simply throwing time away.’ Ron’s eyes were keeping up a constant commentary. ‘Must have been a programmer’s mistake. One of the phases in the process took ten seconds when it needed only three!’

      Jimmy tossed his smile around the table. ‘Seven seconds!’ He beamed delightedly.

      ‘Yes. I had seven seconds available in various different locations around the square, meaning that if I could clear one side, I’d be able to unblock the rest. Perhaps you remember that until a few months ago the whole square was blocked during the morning rush hour? At this zebra crossing,’ he made some marks in one of the corners, ‘scores of pedestrians would accumulate.’

      ‘Yes, I remember!’ I said, into a tableful of surprised faces. Dmitry looked at me silently for two point five to three seconds.

      ‘I retimed the whole day – pressure periods, postpressure periods, after an accident, after a demonstration. I made an appointment with a municipal technician, we opened the control box and he logged in with his laptop and uploaded my new definitions. The traffic was pretty heavy at the time. Yet minutes after we’d run the program everything started flowing with perfect smoothness. The technician went back to his office and I celebrated on my own with a well-earned glass of wine at a bar.’

      ‘Which bar?’ asked Talia Tenne. Talia Tenne likes bars.

      Dmitry didn’t remember.

      After the lecture, Bar sent his numerological reading of Dmitry. It said: ‘Dmitry = kind bollocks scrambler’. It’s an old Hebrew habit or superstition, doing numerologies, but Bar uses a piece of software he wrote while he was supposed to be working on programming for Time’s Arrow to calculate his. Among his favourite numerologies are ‘Rafi Rafael = bald for no reason’, ‘Rafi Rafael = tough midget manager’ and ‘Time’s Arrow = a total waste of time’.

      Our business in Time’s Arrow is saving time. Not seven seconds – for us seven seconds are an eternity. We work for years in order to save a second or two. Not from traffic lights on a square but from the conversation time of each and every call made to directory enquiries: 144 in Israel, 411 in America, 118118 and so on in the UK, 104 in Japan…And why do we need to save a second from conversations to a call centre? Take, for instance, these clients of ours who provide the service in Manhattan. They’ve got a couple of thousand operators in New York answering calls coming in non-stop – 5.5 million phone calls a day in search of telephone numbers. If we can save one second from each call we save 5.5 million seconds a day, which is 63 days, or almost three working months of an employee. Our software can save a company like that around $10,000 a day.

      These numbers were my job. I was the Croc of Numbers! The Belgian company whose representatives Jimmy and I were going to meet takes 44 million calls a year, or more than 120,000 a day, with 300 operators working at any given time. I worked in sales, selling the product to national or private phone companies, landline or mobile, or companies providing directory assistance, DA for short. Recently phone companies have been springing up, or being privatised, all over the place. And every one of these companies needs DA. The market’s worth $145 million this year: next year it’s projected to be $200 million.

      Pearls from Jimmy’s tireless mind: ‘Time’s Arrow is the Fed-Ex of the twenty-first century. Fed-Ex saved days, we save seconds.’ Or: ‘We’re not only living in a world where every second is worth money, but every hundredth of a second.’How do we save this time? Software and consulting. Our software replaces the operator for certain parts of the conversation: it replies, asks for name and location, autocompletes names, searches and finds results in optimal time, reads out the number and dials it. Theoretically, it’s also got voice recognition, but that’s not perfect (yet), and conversations are still shared between software and operators.