The Knob
The photograph showed someone holding an alarm clock, fingers near the mechanism that moves its hands. It was an immediately recognizable picture. Twice a year, we change the clocks.
I began thinking about what I still adjust.
My phone updates itself. So do many of the other displays around me. There are clocks that need attention, but the photograph represents a task that has been quietly disappearing from my life. The hand turning the knob remains our picture of the event, even when no hand is required.
What, exactly, do people want to stop changing?
I live in Scottsdale. Our clocks stay on standard time throughout the year. This weekend, much of the country will move back an hour. Here, the clocks will continue as before.
But my relationship to those places will change.
An eight o’clock call in New York will fall at a different hour in my morning. A live broadcast scheduled elsewhere may appear an hour later in my day. I can leave every clock untouched and still need to reconsider when something happens.
Automating the knob removes one inconvenience. Living somewhere that doesn’t turn it removes another.
Neither makes me independent of everyone else’s clocks.
“Changing the clocks” holds several things inside one phrase.
There is the work of resetting a device. There is the abrupt shift in when we wake, eat, leave for work, or expect someone to call. There is also the arrangement we live with afterward: how much morning light falls before school, how much evening light remains after work.
Someone can dislike the transition and appreciate the summer evenings it makes possible. Someone else can prefer the morning light associated with standard time. Both might say they want to stop changing clocks.
Agreement on that sentence leaves a substantial question unanswered.
Which time do we keep?
The choice becomes clearer when it is described through an ordinary day. Would I prefer more light before leaving in the morning? Later light when I return? What would those choices mean through a whole winter?
I can answer a question about an irritating chore quickly. Imagining a year under a different schedule takes more attention.
The photograph offers the chore.
The decision concerns the year.
Geography enters through the window.
Five in the afternoon is a shared appointment in Miami and Maine. It need not be the same daylight experience.
The common hour lets people coordinate across those differences. It doesn’t make the differences disappear.
Moving the clocks changes the relationship between daylight and our numbered schedules. We can give a later number to sunset. We can arrange for more of our scheduled evening to take place before it. The available daylight still belongs to the season and the place.
“Making better use of daylight” sounds straightforward until we ask whose use, at which hour, and where.
Perhaps that is why the knob interests me.
It gives a complicated arrangement a small, tangible action. Here is the thing we do. Here is the thing we could stop doing.
But we have already stopped doing it on many devices. The arrangement continues through software. Its maintenance has become less visible while its effects go on being felt.
For someone whose clock updates overnight, the first indication might be waking before the alarm. The light through the window might seem wrong for the hour. An appointment could arrive before they felt ready for it. Every display would agree about the time, while they felt slightly out of agreement with everything.
The clocks would have completed their adjustment.
They would be beginning theirs.
That distinction matters when I read that people want to “end the practice.” I want to know which part of the practice they have in mind. The resetting? The transition? The seasonal schedule? Each answer points toward a different expectation of what ending it would accomplish.
Even “leave the clocks alone” needs an explanation. An untouched phone can faithfully carry out both changes every year.
In Scottsdale, the light through my window will follow its gradual seasonal course. My clock will keep counting without repeating an hour.
The difference may arrive through something as ordinary as arranging a call.
“What time?”
The answer will need one more piece of information.
“Your time or mine?”
The Scottsdale exception and this weekend’s November 1 transition are verified against NIST’s current rules.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
