Category Archives: Paul

First of all, let me be the latest to whine about Daylight Saving Time. I hate it for all of the usual reasons that everyone else hates it, but I’ll add my perspective based on our society’s transition to how clocks are set.

If you’re anything like me, your watch, phone, computer, tablet, and cable box all updated themselves last night. They’re all computers talking to other computers and those other computers are talking to the Colossus computer (howdy, Dr. Forbin!) somewhere a mile under some Colorado mountain and the Colossus is hooked into an atomic clock that’s accurate to within a fraction of a microsecond between now and the heat death of the universe. Since they’re all talking, they all make sure that they’re all using the same time frame.

But there are still clocks in our lives that aren’t in that particular computer clique and they have to be reset manually. My bedside clock radio with the honkin’ big red numbers, the wall clocks in the bathroom that are running on a solitary AAA battery, the dashboard clocks in the cars, the clock in the microwave… Time has to be spent hunting down and changing all of those clocks.

That’s not the problem.

The problem is that over time all of these clocks, both sets, will drift a bit. With the computer clocks, they’ll talk to the Mother Ship clock periodically (daily? hourly?) and all get on the same page again. But those manual clocks will get a bit off here and there, which we’ll compensate for in our heads. I know that the bedside clock is a couple of minutes slow, the one in the master bathroom is a minute fast, the one in the guest bathroom is a minute slow, and the one in the old van just blinks because it’s too damn hard to figure out how to set to begin with.

But I’m not going to set them to be off by that amount again! That would be stupid, even by my anal standards. Instead, they all get set to match my watch and/or phone, which in turn match the computer, the cable box… You get the picture.

But tomorrow morning when that alarm goes off and I look at the the clock to see “07:00” I’m going to have to remember that it’s really 7:00, not 7:02.

What a pain!

Meanwhile, while dealing with all of that, we found out this morning that while we were out of town last week one of the bus boys at our “normal” Sunday morning restaurant has been promoted to a waiter’s position. Great, we like him! Except, where’s Connie, my ketchup queen? Oh, that’s why George got promoted? But Connie was our favorite!

Furthermore, when we get to the grocery store after breakfast, we find that in that same week out of town they’ve done a “Fifty-Two Pick Up” on how the store’s arranged, so our ten minute shopping routine turned into over twice that as we just tried to figure out which aisle now had the sodas, where the olive oil got hidden, and who in hell thought it was a good idea to put the potato chips way over THERE?

Somehow it’s all connected, and I’m sure there are stupid politicians behind it all somehow.