Well. The clocks have been moved to their new time zone. No small feat in the digital age. The engineers who create electronic devices with built in clocks often forget to engineer a way to change the time. There are buttons aplenty for changing everything else. Things you wouldn’t want to change. Buttons that change your beloved DVD player’s personality. After punching buttons for a half an hour the DVD player now thinks it’s a toaster. When you put a disc in it toasts it evenly on both sides.
Time changes were much easier in the good olden days. There was no need to search through a booklet of Portuguese instructions to adjust the hour. You simply rotated the entire sun-dial. And of course when I say, “you”, I mean everyone except me. My skills with technology are so insidiously impaired that I can’t even reset an Etch-A-Sketch. I would invariably flip the sun-dial onto its side and then curse the fact that the damn thing didn’t come with an instruction manual. Of course if it DID come with an instruction pamphlet it would be written in Sumerian. Because by law all instruction pamphlets, manuals, or warnings have to be printed in a language that the reader can’t read.
Lucky for me Jo can read Portuguese and she’s technically competent. Her expert hands keep all the time-pieces in concurrence. Although, I have to admit that I wish she had given my plan of only resetting half the clocks a try. The advantage would have been that we wouldn’t have had to reset any clocks. Instead we would have simply redirected our attention to the clocks that were pre-set to the correct time. This system has worked for me for years. In fact the only clocks that didn’t need to be reset this year was my wrist-watch and the clock in my office. They didn’t participate in last year’s unnatural rejiggering of the space-time continuum and were therefore already set to the correct time. When I pointed out this salient fact to Jo I receive the obligatory wifely eye-roll.
It’s the same eye-roll I get when I prattle on about how unnatural and un-American it is for Time to be arbitrarily kneecapped by an act of Congress. The government redefining noon? It’s temporally absurd. Noon is when the sun is at it’s zenith, not when a politician declares it. How dare Congress shake my temporal foundations without asking.
And don’t give me the, “It’s so children don’t have to go to school in the dark” argument. Kids aren’t going to shatter if they’re challenged. In fact, today’s kids are too pampered. Why, back in my school days we were only allowed to go to school in the dark. It was to toughen us up and make us strong. Even when it was light our parents would blindfold us before they sent us off to school. The weak students were culled in traffic accidents leaving only the strong and the lucky to carry society forward.
