For some strange reason, my new clock has lost track of time. Or else somebody is lying about what time it really is.
As I mentioned in my March 2010 post, my old faithful clock radio lost its LED readout. It still woke me up on time, but I couldn’t see the time readout. When a thunderstorm caused a blip in the power, the clock became useless and I had to go out and buy another one. The one I chose came with claims of being automatically set to my time zone with help from an acurate atomic clock source in Boulder, Colorado, which claims accuracy without losing a second in something like a billion years. It also has a backup battery in case of other power outages.
It has worked well, but the time has always been about two minutes behind what the cable company displays on the converter box. Suddenly, this past week, the clock gained another two minutes. Or else Comcast is trying to speed the time along so they can get more programming into a day.
According to an online resource called Weather Shack, the clock is probably not receiving the atomic clock signal, so it has resorted to being just an ordinary clock with no idea whether it is telling the correct time or not. The website recommends unplugging and re-plugging the clock to see if it realigns itself with the mother ship in Boulder.
As a final resort, I will have to take the clock out at night, unplugged, and allow the ET function to phone home. I’m sure the neighbors will gossip about that for a month afterward. I just hope no UFO’s show up.
How did our technology get so strange that we have gone from aligning our television antennas on the rooftop to aligning our clock radios at night? And can the aliens tell us what time it really is?