Watch what I did
It happens every time.
I think that switching time won’t affect me and that it is a mere blip on my daily routine but then Summer Time arrives.
So I sit here with my morning cuppa and I glance at the time on my laptop. Fuck! It’s later than I thought it was. The day is half over and I haven’t even started yet.
The physical aspect of clock changing isn’t too bad. My laptop, my mobile and even the central heating have all reset themselves. The clocks just need their hands moved a bit. The time on the kitchen equipment such as the oven and the microwave are dead easy.
Then it comes to my watch.
My watch is a bastard to adjust. For a start it’s like most modern stuff – it does a ton of things that I would never use and are only there to confuse me. Apart from analogue and digital displays it is a stopwatch and a timer. It has a World Time [?] function. There is a telememo thing that apparently lets me store phone numbers or something. It has a countdown timer and probably a host of other irritations. And to control all of this, there are just four buttons.
So I have to delve back into my archives to find the instructions for setting digital and analogue times. Luckily I have said instructions in digital format so I know where to find them.
It took about a quarter of an hour but I finally cracked it. My watch now tells approximately the right time. I can forget it for another six months or so.
Roll on the abolition of this biannual nonsense..
My old watch was a real pain, it was an analogue one, and it had one “button” of the winder verity with two stops, one stop just stopped and held the hands at whatever point it was at. Useful for setting the seconds to the pips.
The other stop when rotated one way advanced the date, the other direction advanced the time. Quite straightforward really, putting it an hour forward was a doddle, of course going back an hour ment going forward 23 hours which is where the trouble starts, as it had a sort of inertial thingy where you had to rotate at a certain speed to get it to move therfore ensuring you overshoot the correct time by a non-acceptable amount and had to go round again.
Never ended up with that watch more accurate than 5 minutes adrift!
I just leave the clock, yes there is but one, on BST year round. Doesn’t seem to affect anything. As for the kompoota its set to an entirely different time zone and location so out of sync with ‘here’.
I’m strictly old school when it comes to watches–old fashioned analog. Okay, I’ll go as far as a battery powered “quartz” analog type wrist watch but only if I have to. Currently I have a Seiko auto-wind, gear festooned, flywheel with escape thingy, strictly analog watch that has a single button on the side (“crown” I believe it used to be called from the old pocket watch days). Like “Pete J” says in the first comment, the crown button works about the same way. The only problem with the thing is that it runs a bit slow and there’s not a thing I can do about it. The back is an odd one that screws off rather than just pops off like most watches. Even requires a special wrench and a replacement o-ring gasket if you ever want to attempt it.
So it runs slow. I don’t mind so much.
I wholly agree with you. The EU has mandated it has to stop. Ireland choses it’s then it’s fixed from the clock change this October, or March 2020.
Personally I go for the sun being at its highest, that’s mid day, so we’d stick with GMT henceforth.
Of course many others disagree, so it’ll be a slight diversion from the daily Brexit farce.
Coincidentally I stumbled upon this article that gives the background for the UK. Stuff I didn’t know.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6869021/PETER-HITCHENS-Nows-chance-end-clock-changing-craziness.html
I find it mildly humorous that, whenever abolishing clock-changing has been mentioned in Britain, the Scots are noisily up in arms about their poor wee bairns struggling to school in the darkness.
Now that the EU has decided to abandon clock-changing, not a muff from Nutty Nicola Sturgeon about those same poor wee bairns struggling to same school in the same darkness – it seems that when it’s proposed by her bestest buddies in Brussels it’s OK, but if it’s proposed by Westminster, it’s an outrage.
One may suggest that the word ‘Hypocrisy’ applies yet again.
I only realised that BST had happened when I woke up at 9 o’clock to hear the Archers start on Radio4. Quelle Horeursee and bugger it.
I forgot to change my coffee machine timer. I had to have instant this morning…
All clocks/watches/timers/gizmos are all changed now.
Except for the clock in the car.
For some reason that always gets forgotten for a month or three.