You must have heard the old adage…
“A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure!”
I grew up in a time of wind-up watches, every night at we would wait for the 8:00pm news to set our watches. Every watch had some sort of skew, which we would religiously correct every days. That was a time of mechanical wonders, we used to marvel at the swiss, how they built such accuracy in a mechanical wind-up device.
Time keeping has got more and more accurate over time. We went to a quartz movement, then digital watches with higher resolution watches and more or less have the time problem licked. Or so we thought. Along came the cell phone devices and then suddenly there is no longer a need for a watch. Recently I more or less stopped wearing a wristwatch knowing that either the bottom right corner of my computer screen or my phone had the correct time.
The cell phone now corrects the time on its own. When I get off an airplane in a new city/time zone as soon as I power up my phone I know the time. Meetings start on time, conference calls, events, movies. We are getting used to being on time.
10th of March, 2013, time changed over to daylight saving time. I got one hour less sleep, and did not notice. All my clocks (phone, computer, etc) automatically, silently corrected themselves at 2:00am and I did not notice.
But did time change…or was it my clock. My appointments are set according to a time zone so my appointments in outlook moved. Sure Daylight savings time causes switches causes issues, there are countries that have not changed their time (and will do that at the end of march).
So where is this going…we now are more or less dependent on time sync. But there is an issue with time-sync in the real world. More in the next installment…
Samyeer Metrani 