There was a time in my life, long ago, when the idea of keeping accurate time was very important to me. I wore a wristwatch in those days. It was a cheap Casio – reasonable functions wrapped in stainless steel and mineral glass, built to take serious punishment. (I worked with stone back then, punishment a-plenty for a watch!) Somehow, it comforted me, that hourly beep, knowing that it was this hour or that hour. Not almost. Not close. But right now.

That watch opened easily. Good thing, because I opened it often to tweak the adjustment. The frequency of those adjustments grew less and less, mostly, the more I did it. Such was my quest for accuracy.

Jon3 also had a fascination with the accuracy of his watch. Each of us went through similar exercises with our respective timepieces. We were neighbors but sometimes months would pass before we’d see each other. You can just imagine how odd it was to hear our watches announce the hour in unison!

We knew what time it was.

Several years back (but still many years after I had left the compulsion for clock accuracy behind) I stopped wearing a watch altogether. The battery had exhausted itself. By the time I had gotten around to replacing the battery I realized that I didn’t have much need to wear one. For wherever one looks clocks abound, including on the ever-present mobile phone.

All of the clocks in my home display different times. The most accurate, year after year, is the clock on my desk. Every now and again, usually only after the rest of the family hounds me for a while, I’ll sync ’em all up. I’ll check the venerable desk clock against a standard and more often than not it will be plenty close enough. Then I’ll walk around the house fixing all the other clocks and watches I find. Some drift pretty far pretty fast! Everyone’s happy until they drift enough to be annoying.

The computers in the house are another story. All the computers – physical, virtual, PDAs and so on – all sync themselves to a single server in the basement. And that in turn syncs itself to a time server on the Internet. So unless something’s gone wrong they’re always pretty accurate. Without the need to fumble about with a spanner and tiny screwdriver.

And it’s been years since I’ve heard from Jon3.