My Appliances Keep Time Like They Hate Me
The clocks fall back next weekend. My phone will fix itself. My oven, my microwave, my car and my coffee maker won't. Every year I fix two of them, give up on the rest, and spend the whole winter doing math in my own kitchen. Is there a better way to live?
Dreading Endless Clock Resetting,
An Hour Off Until Spring
There is a better way to live. You’ve known what it is for fifteen years. It takes four minutes. And you’re not going to do it, so let’s talk about why.
Every fall the government takes an hour back, and every appliance you own was designed to resent it. Your phone handles it while you sleep, because your phone is smarter than you. Everything else in your kitchen was built by an engineer who has never met a human being. The microwave wants you to hold down Clock, then press Timer twice, then something on the number pad that changes with every model. The car hides it three menus deep, behind Settings, behind Vehicle, next to something about tire pressure. The oven has two buttons and they both do the wrong thing.
None of this is new. We spent the eighties staring at a VCR blinking twelve. Twelve. Twelve. Twelve. An entire nation of people who could program a remote control and couldn’t set the clock on the machine it controlled. We never solved it. We just bought newer things that blinked differently.
So here’s the honest truth: the clocks aren’t the problem. The problem is that you know the oven is an hour off and you’re fine with it. You’ve done the math. You’ve adapted. The car says 6:15, you think 5:15, and you keep driving. You’ve become bilingual in time.
But you asked for a better way, so here it is. Sunday morning, before coffee, before anything, you take the four minutes. You go appliance to appliance like a man defusing bombs. You look up the car on your phone, because you will never remember it. You do the microwave. You do the oven. You do the coffee maker. And you do not stop at two. Two is where you have stopped every single year of your adult life.
And if you can’t face it? Then commit. Leave every one of them wrong. What you don’t do is fix two and leave three. That’s the worst of both worlds: half your house on real time and half on a time zone of your own invention. Pick one reality and live in it.
Either way, wait until March and half of them will be right again on their own. That’s not a fix. That’s just a broken clock being right twice a year.
– Uncle Bobby