The University of Toronto Students’ Union was the subject of more controversy than usual this past week with its filing of a lawsuit against former executive figures. Charges of civil fraud against the UTSU’s former executive director, president, and vice-president internal and services were reported by The Varsity on September 24. The UTSU allege a loss of nearly $250,000 via severance packages and overtime payments. Among the most egregious details is that nearly half that sum came from the roughly 1,975 overtime hours of the executive director that were “recorded in a single entry on April 1, 2015,” which left me scratching my head.
I quickly began investigating the issue. The Wikipedia entry for “Day” specifically refers to this “unit of time” as “an interval equal to 24 hours.” After rigorous number-crunching, I determined the difference between this figure and the claimed number of overtime hours to be 1,951 hours. I kept digging, but the Wikipedia entry for April 1 only said it was the “91st day of the year,” which led me briefly back to the page for “Day” again. I scrolled down for other clues, but there was nothing in the Events section regarding it lasting 1,951 hours longer than other days of the year. I looked into why days last 24 hours and found out it was due to the rotation of the planet. I realized I’d have to take my investigation to someone more knowledgeable of the subject of time.
When I stormed into the Gerstein Science Information Centre yelling, “you nerds gotta explain days to me,” I was met with skeptical looks. One student calmly explained that the speed at which the Earth rotated was 1,600 km per hour. After several hours of attempting to explain cross multiplication, my exasperated companion screamed “Like, 19 kilometres per hour, man! How did you graduate high school?” After a few minutes of them reminding me why I was there and what I had wanted to know, it hit me: Earth’s rotation would have to slow to roughly 19 km per hour to produce a day lasting 1,975 hours.
This seemed unlikely. I personally don’t remember April 1 being 1,975 hours long, or any instance of the Earth’s rotation slowing down by over 1,500 km per hour. As editor of a newspaper’s humour section, I did recall that xkcd What If where the author said if the Earth stopped spinning, the atmosphere would continue rotating at the same speed. If the Earth slowed greatly and the atmosphere’s speed relative to Earth increased to 1,581 km per hour, causing supersonic winds that would rip most buildings—including the UTSU office—off of their foundations, surely this is something I would have heard about? Or at least it should have come up in some other documents found while researching this lawsuit?
I realized I was perhaps thinking about all this the wrong way. Considering the somewhat ambiguous wording of the article, it would be possible that the executive director had been adding 1,975 hours of overtime work accumulated over their entire career in one day but attributing each to the days they had worked overtime. Not exactly standard operating procedure, but more plausible than my previous hypothesis.
I eventually realized I had made a mistake. Considering that the UTSU’s office hours run from 9 AM to 6 PM (a period of nine hours), I realized that my hypothetical 1,975-hour April 1, assuming the executive director worked the whole day, should have run for longer. The number of hours I should have been aiming for was 1,984.
At this point, I admitted to myself that it was probably most likely that a member of the student government had committed fraud.
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