Once upon a time
Once upon a time it was quite easy to set a clock accurately.
The radio stations would pip out their pips from Greenwich and they regularly showed the station clock on television.
Nowadays they don't bother. I'm not a great radio listener so I don't know if the pips are still around but it's many years since I saw a television station clock. I presume they assume we are all hooked up to the Interweb and now get the time on our mobile phones or our computers?
To be honest, I find it a tad unnerving to switch on my laptop and see that it has adjusted the time without my permission. Who gave the Interweb the go ahead to fuck around with my time when clearly that is my job? Who told my phone company that It was quite happy to fuck with my head and to adjust my mobile phone? Maybe I don't wish to change my clocks? Maybe I'm quite happy to run my clocks on local time which is around twenty minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time?
It's not just the Interweb or my mobile phone company either. Even my central heating is laying down the law and fucking up my biological clock, and it's not even connected to the Interweb [I’m not having some fucking hacker breaking in and stealing my heat].
So I woke up this morning and found myself in two timezones. My heating, my phone and my laptop were all saying one thing while my trusty 70 year old electric clock in the kitchen and the short case clock in the sitting room were all saying another. My wrist watch, the cooker and the microwave all voted with the clock in the kitchen and I haven't dared switch on the television yet.
Of course Herself is as confused as hell. Her watch agrees with the kitchen clock but is at odds with her laptop so for the next week or two I'm going to have to tell her two times every time she asks [“It’s six o’clock but a week ago it would have been seven o’clock, or maybe five o’clock”].
Somehow I swear the Sun gets in on the act too. Yesterday I switched on the lights at around six, so in theory I'll have to switch on the lights at five tonight? Oh no! – somehow the Sun decides to set even earlier and I'll bet I'll I have to switch the lights on at four.
So right now I haven't a clue what time it is.
Nor do I really care.
I think I'll have a nap anyway.
You could be like the president of Turkey and just change the date when the clocks were changed
I just tried that but it didn't work. I set my date to June 21st but it's still as fucking dark and gloomy outside.
"To be honest, I find it a tad unnerving to switch on my laptop and see that it has adjusted the time without my permission. Who gave the Interweb the go ahead to fuck around with my time when clearly that is my job? Who told my phone company that It was quite happy to fuck with my head and to adjust my mobile phone?"
You did. You can switch off daylight saving time in the settings.
Damnit! I never read these things. I just install stuff and let it run. I leave technical stuff like settings and configuration to the geeks.
You can stop clocks and switch down computers but time marches on. The sun too keeps orbiting around us; you can't tell it to stop. So can ornate garden sundials be tampered with to make them conform to summer time?
I have an ornate sundial in the garden. The only problem is that trees grew up around it so now it never sees the sun. It looks nice though.