Writer’s Rant
November 1, 2024
Clock-watchers
It’s time to throw away your old clocks. Twice a year, we have to adjust our digital clocks, either an hour forward or an hour back. But in these modern “times”, wouldn’t it just be easier to buy a self-adjusting clock, than to figure out how to adjust your digital one? Sure, when you bought that digital clock, it came with a little 2×2, folded piece of paper with instructions in 4 different languages on how to set the time, which you have stashed in your junk drawer so that years later you know exactly where to find it, right?
And then there are cars. I know people who don’t bother changing the clocks in their cars and it’s off by an hour, 6 months out of the year. And there are others who have to make an appointment at the dealership because it’s faster and easier to take it there and have them do it, than figure out the instructions in the manual (now where did it put that manual?).
This year, my friend decided to do away with an old wall clock. Wall clocks aren’t usually digital and have a face. Some have all twelve numbers, some just a few and then for the truly adventurous, no numbers at all, just lines where the numbers should be. (And if your a bit older like me, don’t be surprised when one day your doctor hands you a piece of paper and asks you to draw a clock with the hands at 12 and 9). Now of course, these older clocks with faces can just be taken off the wall and adjusted by the little wheel on the back. The biggest challenge is hanging it back up. But that can be very “time” consuming, so avoid that arduous task and simply buy an “atomic” clock.
I had heard about atomic clocks but didn’t know how they worked or anything about them, so of course, I looked them up on google. I just figured that somewhere there was this really “Big Ben” that knew exactly what time it was, everywhere in the world, (kind of like Santa Claus), and it somehow communicated the correct time to every atomic clock in the world. But when I started reading about atomic clocks, it read something about atoms being more accurate….which is where I stopped reading.
So my friend posed the question to me, “I wonder how the clock adjusts itself from DST to EST?” Well I had stopped reading at the word “atoms” and of course I had no answer for that. So we are determined to find out, which requires that we stay up until 2 AM this Sunday morning and see if the clock stops for and hour, or the hands on the clock simply go in reverse for an hour. We could make it like a New Year’s party (which would require I stay up until at least midnight, and that hasn’t happened in years, so what are the chances I can make it until 2 AM?). Or, we could look for the instructions written in four different languages that have been stuffed away somewhere in a drawer….but who has “time” for that?
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