Ah, daylight savings time. What was the point of it again? Oh yeah … it doesn’t work, but Congress look concerned and attentive. This isn’t easy for them, so they’ll clutch at any straw.
Anyway, I have a lot of “atomic clocks,” which are really radio-synchronized clocks that get their signal from the super-low-frequency transmitter at WWVB in Fort Collins, Colorado. I like these because you can forget about your timepieces except when you need to replace the batteries five years later. They set themselves to the radio signal.
The bad news is that the radio signal doesn’t actually get through all the time. Mostly it doesn’t matter, since once a week is plenty, but it’s a pain around the daylight savings time transition. Half my clocks have updated themselves and the others haven’t. Worse, these “zero-config” clocks are very inconvenient to set manually, maybe impossible. And because resetting these clocks is something you do twice a year at most, it’s hard to remember the steps.
Once again, a promising technology gets messed up by sloppy implementation. Where’s the button to push that says, “don’t try to synch up just once per night, keep trying continuously, damn it!” Where’s the “synch over WiFi” feature? Failing that, where are the set of, “never mind, I’ll set it myself” buttons?
People talk as if timekeeping was a mature market, but clocks and watches are designed by idiots. There’s probably good money out there waiting for a designer with half a brain, provided he isn’t saddled instantly with a pointy-haired boss who prevents all progress.