A Clockwork Random

Time. It's more than just a magazine.

This weekend marked the "Turn Back the Clock" portion of the annual calendar, which means it causes many Halloween's Eve partygoers to be able to stay out on the town an extra hour and many Sunday morning churchgoers to show up an hour early to mass. Rumor has it Benjamin Franklin had the original thought behind the whole "time-shifting" concept. Fact has it that no one has more fun with the concept than those who inhabit Random Run Lane.

Here's the backstory.

We moved into the apartment in June 2003. As part of the decorating process, it was decided that a omnipresent timepiece needs to be placed somewhere in the main living area. Fortunately for us, I had such an omnipresent time piece - El Reloj Digital. (I don't know why it just became Spanish, but I'm too lazy to reach over to that backspace key people keep telling me about.) I got it as a gift from a guy back at W&M for helping him with his senior music project - it's this clock that's supposed to be getting satellite signals from the Pentagon or something so that I'll always have the most precise time available. Big digital numbers, it even tells me the temperature of the apartment when we refuse to turn the heat on until February.

Well, this weekend of 2003 rolled around, and I called all my closest friends and family over to watch the clock magically revert to 2am once the Federal Government gave the all clear. (By closest friends and family, I really mean some couch pillows and Spud) Anyways, it was like New Years, awaiting that magical moment when 2:59 would turn back into...

3:00?

Ok, so it didn't go as planned. But that left us with a bleary-eyed dilemma. We could either 1) Fix it manually, which requires actually reaching up, getting El Reloj off el wall, and manually altering it, or 2) Screw it, go to bed.

Easiest decision ever.

We left it as is, and have been enjoying the extra hour ever since. Any time you look up at the clock, you know you have one full hour more than what it says. This works incredibly. It lets me stay up an hour later. When I'm getting ready for work and an hour late, I'm really not. So many possibilities.

Decision Number 2 is when the clocks needed to be switched to daylight savings in April. This would mean that el Reloj would be correct once again. But after 6 months of living on an extra hour of borrowed time, it just wasn't something I was ready to return to. Thus, we did the only logical thing to do.

We moved the clock back an hour.

This allowed us to continue this chronological mindgame throughout the year. In fact, it's hard to even comprehend that clock showing the right time. And now that the time change has happened again, it is now off by 2 full hours. Why do I get the feeling we're going to not change it yet again???

Call it a matter of timing.