A clock that doesn’t know the time
Posted on
For months, the clock in the bus shelter near my house has had a habit of dropping several minutes a day. It’s worrying when the buses are more punctual than the clocks. The shelter itself was ‘upgraded’ last year. It now has a digital display at one end. It shows the times for the next few buses that are due relative to the current time, which it flashes up occasionally on screen. Just not very well.
Quite how it manages to be wrong remains a mystery. I’ve always considered time to be a universal concept and not one prone to variance. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind variety. Just not in clocks. If this was an analogue device dependant on batteries or manual winding I could forgive some slippage. But surely a digital clock connected to a permanent power source shouldn’t suffer from similar ailments.
This one did. During the course of a week, I could get to the bus stop knowing the difference between the actual time and the time on display would have increased. Despite arriving at what I considered to be the same time every morning, at least by conventional time, the clock in the bus stop would inform me that I was early and that, in fact, on some mornings I still had a couple of hours to wait for my usual bus. Thankfully said bus didn’t operate on this clock’s time and would (usually) arrive minutes later to take me to work.
While the clock was reset every now and again, it only proved to be a temporary fix. It would appear to be correct only for a matter of hours. After this it would start falling behind again. If it were a person I could understand. Time does seem to go slower when you’re waiting for a bus. I’ve used the bus to go to work for the last decade and I shudder to think how much of my life I’ve lost waiting for the next one to come along. However, since it’s not a person, and since I’ve never heard of a sympathetic clock before, I’m just assuming it was broken.
The inability to tell the time to even a modest level of accuracy is quite a considerable flaw for a clock. It’s a bit like having an aeroplane that can’t fly or a door that won’t open. If glue stops being sticky, it is no longer glue. And if you can’t use it to tell the time, it’s not a clock.
Last week, the clock was fixed. Since Monday, it has told the right time, and shown the right buses. But I’ve since come to realise that it doesn’t really matter whether it works or not anyway. As well as the digital clock, the bus shelter also has a paper timetable at the other end. The times on both are different. The buses arrive in time with neither of them. At least when the clock was slow, it looked like the buses were early.