I know on what date we'll “fall back” ten years from now..
Why do I know that esoteric piece of knowledge, you ask? Well, I answer, it has to do with the time change this past weekend. Loraine and I both have these high-tech alarm clocks, ones that use radio signals to keep up to the second and ones that use high tech processors to know when Daylight Savings Time begins and ends. It wouldn't surprise me, in fact, to know our clocks have more power and memory than the computers that were used to send humans to the moon.
But that's neither here nor there.
Sunday morning when we woke up Loraine's clock had changed automatically, but mine hadn't. Mine was living in it's own temporal dimension, thinking it was an hour ahead of we mere mortals. I had no idea why; everything looked like it should have changed automatically, but it didn't. I had to change the time by hand, itself a rather technical feat considering how advanced the clocks are. But after that the time was correct, and I totally forgot about it.
Flash forward to this morning. Loraine's alarm went off as it usually does at 645 am, and I, like I usually do, rolled over to go back to sleep. Only out of the corner of my eye I noticed that my clock said it was 545 am. I was kind of puzzled about that; Loraine didn't say anything about waking up early, and I don't think she'd roll out of bed just for giggles. That's about the time I noticed that the light indicating my clock was on Daylight Savings Time was off.
That's right. Instead of changing Sunday it changed early today, for no particular reason.
Of course, once I noticed that I couldn't get back to sleep, and so having an extra hour (or so) added to my day I decided to figure out what the heck was going on. I checked my clock through and through. It was on the correct date, it was set up to change between Daylight Savings Time and “Why The Heck Is It Dark So Early” time, and everything else appeared to be fine. Yet, it had changed between times a day after it was supposed to, and my little pea brain couldn't figure out why.
That's when Loraine noticed that I was up & around earlier than usual. When I told her the reason, she was as stumped as I. So I just sat around, trying to wake up. A few minutes later, she came into our living room and asked a simple question--
“Do you think the clocks have a year setting”?
I have to admit, I couldn't answer the question. I had never seen one, and the (pitifully lame) book that came with the clocks never mentioned one. But that got me to thinking, which we all know can be a dangerous thing, and I headed back into the bedroom to see if it did. After almost 10 minutes of pushing buttons, and a lot of fumbling around just hoping something would happen, I came across a screen that said “32”. I pulled out my phone, and checked a calendar for 2032. November 7th, 2032, is the first Sunday of November, the Sunday on which we always fall back.
My alarm clock, in an attempt to live in its own temporal dimension, wasn't just an hour off. It was a decade and an hour off.
I have no idea how it got that way. It's switched the time the weekend it's supposed to for several years now. Why it just started to think it's 2032 instead of 2022 is beyond my pay grade. Maybe a power outage fried its brain. Maybe the little plastic cow I have sitting next to it managed to change it somehow. Maybe the clock, of its own volition, jumped ahead into the future to see if the Lions still suck. I don't the how; I just know that it did.
I reset the “32” to “22” and, with any luck, things will now be working okay. However, if come March and the time changes back to Daylight Savings Time, I'll know where to look. And I'll also probably be able to learn on which March day the time will change in 2033.
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