Why clocks are my worst nightmare

I have the worst luck with setting clocks, digital ones, the ones that blink when the power goes out.

The clock on my husband’s coffee maker would blink for weeks. I’d get sick of it and set it. The power would go out within twenty-four hours. I stopped setting clocks. When Daylight Savings Time comes around, my husband gets that job.

One time after setting the fateful coffeemaker clock, I was working in the library. A community member was attempting to show a movie from the projector in the meeting room. Being the staff tech expert (meaning I wasn’t scared to try things), I was troubleshooting why the VCR signal wasn’t reaching the projector. I tried all the usual things–testing the cord connections, reading the instructions, pushing random buttons–nothing was would make the video play or show on the screen it was intended to. As a last ditch effort, I turned everything off.

When I pushed the button to turn the system back on, the overhead lights went out. They weren’t out for just the room, or the library, but most of the town. And they stayed off until the next morning. Supposedly a transformer blew, but we know the real story.

Lesson learned: Don’t play with clocks.

You can imagine my terror when I filled in for our church janitor last fall and had to reset all the classroom clocks for the end of Daylight Savings Time. Since the furnace broke the previous time I filled in and everyone had icicles hanging from their noses on Sunday morning, what would happen after I reset a dozen clocks?

We escaped unscathed, perhaps because they were all analog.