990 Semiannual Time Rant

990  Semiannual Time Rant

It’s daylight saving time, dummy.  Not daylight savingS time.  You’ll find this kind of post here twice a year, no matter when the Gods of Time inflict the clock change on us.  They keep changing it, and it’s hard to keep up with.

Especially when you have a million clocks as we time compulsives tend to.  

There are three kinds of time compulsives.  The most common is the perpetually punctual.  This is followed by the perpetually late, people who know when they have to be somewhere and no matter how carefully they plan, no matter how many watches and clocks they own and use, just can’t be on time.  The third is the perpetually early and most of those don’t need a clock at all.  Early is in their DNA.

The house is full of watches and clocks.  One evening is not enough time to set them all when we switch to or from daylight saving time.

This time, the only clock in the place that didn’t get reset was the one that’s supposed to set itself and didn’t.  It relies on a radio signal which comes in only through a window facing east.  This one has to be reset by putting it on a windowsill and that’s tough to remember.

Other self-setting clocks -- the phones, the computers -- rely on internal brains or cell towers.  Takes the sport out of this time of year.

There are a number of approaches to the resetting of the ones you have to reset yourself.  

The Scientific Approach:  Start at one end of the place or on the highest or lowest floor if you have several and work your way across, up or down.

There’s the Random Approach:  change each clock as you walk past in the course of ordinary walking around.

There’s the Really Random approach which will have you resetting clocks over the course of several days.

Going from standard to daylight is easier than the reverse, because every clock sets forward easily.  But some still need special attention.  Example:  a mechanical analog watch that also shows the date.  You can’t set these between 9pm and midnight on any given day because it will screw up the date mechanism.  So you have to be compulsively early with them, or compulsively late.

And some digital watches just don’t want to be set at all and send you through all kinds of hoops at time change time.  Even when you follow the directions which you now have to find on the internet because who keeps those microscopic instruction sheets that come with the watch and which are harder to refold than even an old fashioned road map.


Shrapnel:

--Bob Nardelli is falling up again.   After failing to win the chairmanship of General Electric, then putting Home Despot on the rocks and helping Cerberus Capital nearly destroy Chrysler, he’s leaving his post as CEO of another Cerberus subsidiary, “Freedom Group,” the huge manufacturer of guns.  You’d better hope this guy doesn’t get elected President of either this or any other important country.

--All this fuss over birth control pills raises an interesting question.  Why isn’t this stuff available over the counter like vitamins and headache remedies?  Oh, wait … it’s because that would eliminate many unnecessary doctor visits which help keep both MDs and pharmacists in a recurring stream of bucks while lovingly turning women dependent in an age of liberation.

--Gov. Cuomo proposes giving more money to municipalities this year in return for less this year as a way to soften financial crises in Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, Utica, and the city.  So what'll happen next year? One way to solve this problem is to fire every deputy commissioner of anything and remove relatives and cronies of every official from the payrolls.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012