Adventures in Time

No - its not a reference to the eternity that I am spending in New Hampshire. This is a story about clocks. Or rather, a clock. The Portsmouth IT office recently moved to a new location. In the room that we are using as a testing lab is a wall clock - frozen at 6.20.

Given that we are spending a lot of time in what is essentially a windowless room we figured we would whack in some new batteries to have some way of measuring just how long it was until we could all escape. Taking the clock down from the wall in order to ascertain just how many batteries it needed I was struck by something. On first inspection it looked like a perfectly ordinary clock. The sort of innocent, institutional, plastic clock that knows its place in the world and is happy to just tick away your hours of servitude. Naturally I was wrong - this clock turned out to be a relation of the devil himself. Sure, not a sibling hell bent on living up to his older brothers record - more of a second cousin thrice removed that chats nicely to the devil at a family gathering whilst Aunt Hilda gets into the Gin & Tonic.

The first sign was the fact that the back of the clock had a battery compartment (as expected) with a rather precise looking sticker inside the battery compartment. "Don't Place Battery Here". Not quite what you expect. Mind you, fair enough. I mean sure, it looks exactly like the place you pop the battery - right down to the handy etching of a battery - but okay, obviously the people who built it are the experts in the particular design features of this sort of $1.50 plastic wall clock.

Casting ones eyes around the rest of the clock I noticed two further items that should have given me pause for thought. The first was an 8 part instruction sticker as to how to reset the clock. The second was a two battery device that was attached to the bottom of the clock in what can only be described as a parasitical fashion - sort of like an electronic tick. (arf arf)

Reading through the instructions it became clear what this parasite was - an automatic, daylight savings time adjustment device. In order to reset the clock you had to do the following;

1. remove the batteries. For some reason the instructions were quite insistent on this point. Not sure why as I had rather assumed that removing the batteries was a key aspect of the exercise in the first place.

2. using the wheel turn the hands to the 12 O'Clock position.

3. select which particular US time zone you were in

4. reset the year

5. reset the date

6. reset the time - steps 3 through 5 taking place on the parasitical device that had a little digital screen and 4 buttons arranged in a singularly unhelpful, and desperately un-intuitive fashion.

7. insert the batteries - by now I was beginning to wonder when they would be required. Of course in all the confusion of reading instructions for what one had assumed to be a simple task I mixed the old and new batteries up. Bloody good job they were different brands.

8. re-hang the clock on the wall and spend the next 20 minutes watching it sweep through the seconds, minutes and hours at the pace of a slightly arthritic snail until it reached the time that you had hopefully intented to set it to.

This whole effort naturally lead me to ponder, and somewhat admire, the perverse genius capable of blending the features of an analogue and digital clock to such pointless effect. When you consider that people had to re-design the clock, come up with the parasite, re-tool production lines, come up with new marketing material (I imagine something along the lines of 'are you lazy to get off your arse and change the time twice a year? You deserve a clock like this one!'). Not to mention the fact that a clock that once upon a time required 1 battery now requires 3. "Wait!" I hear you cry, "3? You only mentioned 2!" Well, the observant amongst us will notice that I was using the digital parasite whilst the batteries were not in the clock - something I was able to do because it had its own separate watch battery. God only knows what happens in the event that it goes flat - probably the end of civilisation as we know it.

The point being a pretty significant chunk of time spent for what I had always imagined was a relatively simple task twice a year.

Not to mention I just spent 45 minutes writing this bloody entry.

And the best thing? All of this is for nought - last year Congress passed a bill that shifted the ruddy date anyways. So the damn thing won't work - and now you will have to get off your butt and spend 10 minutes wrestling with the stupid digital part to change the freaking time rather than just twisting the knob on the back.

As you can tell. Really not a lot going on up here and I have been in a hotel for way to long.