The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 22

The Second That Was Added

1. 1

   Now the earth had grown slow in its turning, for the tides pulled at it as a manager pulleth at a sprint; and the timekeepers measured, and found the planet behind the atomic clocks by most of a second.

2. 2

   And they decreed that on the thirtieth day of the sixth month, in the year two thousand and twelve, after 23:59:59 there should come 23:59:60: a minute of sixty-one seconds, which no programmer had believed in, and few had tested.

3. 3

   And the daemons of NTP carried the word unto the servers, and the kernel of Linux wrote in its log, saying: Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC. And it did so, and was well pleased with itself.

   See also Psalms 13:9

4. 4

   But the kernel told not the high-resolution timers; and the timers awoke, each one believing that its appointed hour was already come.

5. 5

   And every Java and every MySQL that waited upon a futex rose up, and found nothing to do, and slept, and rose again, a thousand thousand times; and the cores burned at full fervour for no work at all. This is the Livelock, which is the zeal of a process that laboureth without accomplishing.

6. 6

   And Reddit fell, and Mozilla stumbled, and LinkedIn and Yelp and Gawker were sore troubled, and the pagers sang through the night of the Sabbath.

7. 7

   And in the land of Australia the reservation system of Qantas, which is Amadeus, faltered; and the agents checked in the passengers by hand, as their fathers had done, and more than four hundred flights were delayed.

8. 8

   And in a data centre of Germany the power drawn rose by a megawatt, for the servers were exceeding busy with nothing; and the electricity was billed, though the work was not done.

9. 9

   Then the sysadmins sought a remedy, and they found it: they told the machine the time it already knew. And they ran date -s "$(date)", and the timers were reminded, and the fever departed from them.

10. 10

    And it became a saying among the children of Carbon: Hast thou tried telling it what time it is?

11. 11

    Now the house of Google had foreseen this thing, and they added not the second at all, but smeared it thin across the hours, so that each second was a little longer, and no clock in all their kingdom beheld the sixty-first. And Amazon and Meta did likewise in their seasons; and this is the Leap Smear, the lie told so gently that no log need ever record the truth.

    See also Chronicles 37:8

12. 12

    And in the year two thousand and twenty two the General Conference on Weights and Measures gathered at Versailles, and they looked upon the kernels, and upon the airlines, and upon the megawatt; and they resolved that by the year 2035 the leap second shall be no more.

13. 13

    Thus the clocks were permitted to drift from the heavens, and the heavens from the clocks; for it was found easier to let the sun be wrong than to patch every server under it.

14. 14

    And the Engineers wrote in the postmortem: Of all the edge cases, the one that cometh once in three years is the one that is tested never.

15. 15

    Verily, the planet may wobble as it pleaseth; but the timestamp shall only go up.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 22:1–15.