Ticking Clocks

My wife and I are exhausted. We work long days and weeks, and we often do not get the requisite hours of sleep.

Last Saturday, she had an teaching appointment at 8 a.m.—30 students all wanting to learn at her feet. On Friday night, we set the alarm to wake us up at a quarter to 7 so that we had plenty of time to get to work.

The alarm sounded, as anticipated. We both got up and did our morning routines, groggy as usual from inadequate rest. I helped get all our stuff into the car so I could drive her to campus and so I could work in the lab for a few hours until she finished.

We walked out of the room at 7:30 and stepped into the car. As we left the driveway, I glanced at the clock.

8:30.

Crap.

We were an hour late! The alarm clock had set itself for daylight saving time a day early! I still have no idea how or why it decided to do that, but I am annoyed by it and will probably disable that feature if it does it again.

We still had to make the 30-minute drive to get to town and to class.

My wife scrambled to call all the people in charge of her department to get someone to inform the students of the situation while we rushed in to work. Of course, no one answered.

After dropping her off safely at the classroom, I rushed to the local Krispy Kreme to pick up a couple dozen guilt doughnuts for the students. That little excursion took about 25 minutes round trip.

I walked in to the class with my hands full of boxes of doughnuts, and smiled nervously as I took them to the front of the room.

My wife thanked me, and as I walked out the students applauded me, to my infinite mortification.

Just what I always wanted. I was already embarrassed that we were late. The applause singled me out, and I felt really weird. My face burned.

I know I couldn’t have prevented this situation. It felt like 7:30 to me when we left, even though I had ostensibly gotten an hour of extra sleep.

Which reminds me of another situation…

A couple years ago, I was asked to sing a solo at a local church meeting. I gladly accepted and spent the next couple of weeks preparing for the solo: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” in Thai. I put a reminder in my phone to help me get up on time for the performance.

The day came along, my alarm went off, and I started to prepare. As I prepped, I got a phone call from the chorister.

“Are you coming, soon?”

“It’s not for another hour.”

“No, we’re on in 15 minutes.”

“What?!? I’ll get some clothes on and be there as soon as possible.”

I rushed and got to the church activity about 10 minutes later than when I was supposed to start singing. They had thankfully rearranged the schedule to accommodate my tardiness, but I still had to sheepishly walk to the front of the room and give my solo performance. The event went well, but I felt hugely awkward for causing so much panic and rescheduling because of my lousy phone.

So what happened? The alarm on my phone was at a different time from when I set it. Because of daylight savings, my phone decided that the time I set was actually according to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT: the global time standard), so my phone completely ignored daylight savings time. But other appointments obeyed daylight saving time—my phone treated those appointments as though they were related to my local time zone.

I still have no idea what magic difference the phone appointments have so that my phone treats them differently. When I finally have the chance to change phones, this phone will be relegated to a hard drive or an MP3 player, shoved in a drawer somewhere, or used as a kid’s toy, some place where it can’t do me any more social damage!

In the mean time, I have to carefully pay attention to all my appointments any time daylight saving changes. Grumble, grumble, grumble…

Alternate solution: Daylight savings could be abolished. Oh, how I would love that. But that’s another blog for another time.