Goddamned Clocks!

As my mother reminded me of the change of our clocks yesterday, it landed upon me as a smirk since it reminded me of the rather insane rabbit hole I went down the last time I wrote about it here.

But then I was caught out twice. Our digital devices change themselves automatically, from my phone to computer to the cheap analogue clock I got in Lidl for €10 that updates itself from a mysterious radio tower somewhere. So of course it was my father's analogue kitchen clock that caught me out. The usual pantomime around this device is for it to tell the wrong time for at least ten days before I get impatient and change it myself.

Yet inexplicably, and on a Sunday of all days, my father changed it himself this time, and for a second time in one day I was left with egg on my face as I took it for the "old" time when I relied on it later that day in anticipating my sister's arrival with her kids.

Monday morning saw my return to the rhythm of the week's routine, and I was due in town for a 09.30 appointment. As I went out with my dog in our morning routine, I was admiring the sunshine and the bumblebees who are busying away already, how spring has well and truly sprung and patting myself on the back for being so organized on a Monday morning with the clock in my car registering 06:55.

About 45 minutes later I was home and checking a few emails before heading on in to town for my meeting. Only for panic to strike when, after what must have been half an hour of concentration and productivity, out of the corner of my eye something snagged as the clock on my computer breezed past 9:30. And for the third time in two days, I was foiled by this monstrous idiosyncrasy of our modern society that so arbitrarily wrenches the very fabric of time from right under our feet, repeatedly and without mercy.

My car, which connects itself to the the same internet we wire our brains directly into, which has its own app on my phone so that I can track its location if stolen, but more commonly obsess over whether I actually locked it and send repeated unnecessary lock instructions to it from afar after I've parked it, remains the one digital device holding out against the world in its own little protest at the change in the clocks twice a year.

And so I shall scream it into the void …