Digital Clocks

Will Someone Come Over Here And Push My Buttons?


Have I ever mentioned that I have a love hate relationship with digital clocks?

Well, I do…particularly the old ones or the new cheep ones that don’t have a battery back-up to save the correct time when the power goes off.

Appliances with clock displays fall into this same category, and we have several in our home. I know that some people endure the display endlessly flashing 12:00 on their VCR’s, but I can’t stand that situation most of the time in our house

When I returned home to our little island early yesterday evening I was greeted with not one but FOUR blinking displays due to electrical interruptions caused by Tropical Storm Alberto.

Even my good friend “Mr. Oven” was flashing 12:00 angrily at me.

To add insult to injury, after slovenly resetting only our bedroom clock, the power was briefly interrupted again last night and now even it has to be reset again.

I’ve been thinking for years about coming up with an invention that would not only be a pretty cool idea, but would save all of the technically inept and lazy people among us a good deal of heartache.

Imagine if the power company came up with a way to encode the time into the electrical grid so that anything plugged into a wall outlet in your home could read the correct time after a power failure?

For older appliances, I would make a little adapter that plugs into the wall outlet that decodes the time signal, and then get Intel or the Chinese to build a chip that could be included in all new electronics and appliances in the future that could read the power companies’ signals.

In addition to resetting the time after a power interruption, your stove could check the time at least once each day, so that it isn’t a half hour slow or fast or burning your meatloaf while you’re stuck in traffic and it’s busy timer cooking dinner.

Now if you excuse me, I need to go get my really big hammer go reset my clocks...