An argument for mandatory astronomy education

Ok. I'm going to obfuscate this enough so that it is not obvious who I'm describing in this particular entry, but if you think about it you can probably figure it out.

Anyway... this morning, several of us got together for a few hours. The location where we met had a sign on the door saying something like: open Sunday 8:30am - 12:00pm. I didn't notice the sign, but a few others mentioned at ~11:30 that we were going to have to leave shortly. This was a bit disappointing because we usually stick around until ~1:00pm. Around 11:45, we didn't see anyone coming in to ask us to leave, the lights weren't being dimmed -- there were no signs that they really were intending to close in 15 minutes. So, just to check what was going one, one of our group went and asked an employee.

The person who works at this particular place is not very friendly. If you ask her a question, in general she tends to snap at you, and this time was apparently no different. The conversation went something like this:

"Excuse me, but are you closing at noon?"

"No -- didn't you see my sign?"

"Yes, and it says that the building closes at 12pm, so do we need to leave in 15 minutes?"

"No! That's why I put up the sign, we close at 12pm!"

"Ummm, 12pm is noon"

"No it's not -- we close at 12pm midnight."

We all had a good chuckle, then stayed until 1:00 PM