The story of things …… silly history

It remains a sad fact of my life that at 74 with fewer years ahead of me than behind, I remain challenged by so many bits of technology that most people take in their stride.

Take for instance changing the time on the oven clock to accommodate the clocks going forward or backwards every half year.

It matters not that I have the manual and can call up helpful advice from You Tube and countless experts. 

The oven clock refuses to perform the way it should.

I follow the instructions …..  it refuses to accommodate me …..  I turn the thing off, repeat the process every so often over a few days, and then without warning it does what everyone tells me is so easy.

This always catches me out and despite having carefully got the correct time on each previous attempt this time I am always out by 5 minutes.  

Do I start the process again to get the right time?

Do I heck. It is enough that after fourteen attempts across Sunday through to Monday I have a time almost resembling the ones on my phone and on the clock on the wall.

By chance it is 5 minutes ahead, and that is good enough for me, as I reason thinking it is later than it is will mean none of us is late to an appointment.

All of which dodges that more profound problem that I have never grappled with the mechanics of Daylight Saving Time.  I understand the logic and the history of the idea but despite being patiently told what happens I can not visualise the process.  So I don’t put the clocks forward or backward, instead I wake up on the Sunday, and wait for the wireless announcer to tell me which hourly news broadcast I am listening to.

Of course today my smart phone and the computers have already understood what to do and adjusted their clocks accordingly, which reinforces my position on the ladder of creation as somewhere between an amoeba and a gerbil.

Location; sometime at the beginning of the 20th century

Pictures; Stubborn oven clock, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson