I got out of the military and switched to 12 hour time when I was living a pure 8-5 work life. Now I work, and work with people at all hours, so I’ve switched back to 24 hour time, though I still speak in 12 hour time. If I’m scheduling something, it is in 24 hour time. If someone asks me what time it is, I’ll look at my phone and it will read 17:00 but I’ll say 5 without blinking.

And the military doesn’t say one thousand five hundred thirty like this clueless OP says. They say fifteen thirty. And the reason they don’t speak in 12 hour time like civilians in many countries, is because saying, “we need you on the left flank by 1530” is more efficient and less ambiguous than “we need you on the left flank at 3:30, over.”

“Wait, do you mean am or pm?”

“-m”

“I didn’t copy, you broke up”

Etc etc.

EDIT also I forgot to mention, 1530 is quicker and more efficient to type on a typewriter or teletype than 15:30. As long as everyone is on the same page, but orders would also have a date to correspond with the time, so it is pretty obvious.

In the US, 24 hour time was first used by the military, and that really only started with the Navy in 1920. The Army didn’t adopt it until WWII. So for a lot of US Americans that was their first exposure to using it, and it corresponded to a time when a lot of people were veterans, so the term “military time” just evolved from that perfect storm of consequences.

Alternatively, adoption of 24 hour time in many European countries started on the civilian side.

Says someone that grew up with them. And they are a little more complicated than “green means go, red means stop”. Efficiency and simplicity aren’t synonyms.

Personally I’m glad we are getting more of them. When I lived in England, and where I learned how to use them, I could see their effectiveness. This was long before they started gaining in popularity in the US. Living in the US, you may have only seen them in pictures, or in a scene in a movie, so it just looked like an absolute clusterfuck if you didn’t know what was going on. Now, I just wish people here would fucking signal properly when using them because that is really the key to maximizing their efficiency.

This is the way.

More like porridge with beer…made out of old porridge.

Fuck society and their oppressive insistence on wearing “pants”.