Three days ago the clocks jumped forward and I am still finding devices in this house that have not caught up. This happens every single year and every single year I act surprised, like some raccoon got into the attic and personally reset every clock radio out of spite.
Let me just list what's currently wrong, because I went around the house last night with my phone doing an actual audit like a lunatic.
The oven is an hour behind. Not a huge deal except my oven's clock interface requires holding down two buttons simultaneously while a third one blinks, and I genuinely cannot remember the sequence without looking it up, and the manual is long gone. So the oven is just going to be wrong until, I don't know, November, when it'll accidentally be right again for one glorious day before falling behind in the other direction. I've made peace with this. It's less a bug at this point and more a seasonal feature.
My old Casio G-Shock, the one I keep in a drawer as a backup watch, is obviously an hour off too, but that one doesn't bother me because it's not connected to anything and I don't expect it to know. There's something almost relaxing about an object that has no idea what year it is, let alone what time.
The genuinely annoying one is the thermostat. It's a Nest, it's supposedly smart, it is on my wifi, and it still needed a manual nudge because apparently the schedule I set years ago didn't propagate correctly through some app update last fall. So for two mornings the heat kicked on an hour later than it should have and I woke up in a cold house convinced something was actually broken, when really it was just being extremely literal about a schedule from 2022.
And then there's the little kitchen speaker, a hand-me-down Sonos One that lives on top of the fridge and occasionally announces the time when you ask it something unrelated. It corrected itself instantly, no fuss, which almost makes the others look worse by comparison. If one gadget in your house can figure it out over the network in real time, why is the oven still stuck doing interpretive button-hold rituals from 2009.
I know the actual complaint here isn't really about clocks. It's that we've built this pile of devices that are supposedly connected and synced and smart, and yet the actual experience of daylight saving time hasn't gotten meaningfully better in the fifteen years I've been keeping this blog. If anything it's gotten more annoying, because now there are more clocks to check. In 2011 I had maybe four things in my house that told time: a wall clock, a microwave, my phone, and my car. Now I could probably find fifteen if I really looked, counting the dumb little display on the air purifier and whatever the router's admin page thinks the time is.
I'm not proposing we get rid of daylight saving time, mostly because I've had that argument at every dinner table for a decade and it never goes anywhere productive. Everyone agrees it's mildly stupid and then nothing happens, which is basically how most infrastructure complaints go. I just think it's funny that the "smart" home promise from a decade ago was supposed to make this exact kind of thing invisible, and instead I spent twenty minutes last night manually poking at a thermostat with my finger like it's 2004.
Anyway. If your oven clock is also wrong right now, you're not alone, and if you actually remember your button-hold sequence, please don't tell me, I don't think I could handle the guilt of knowing it was solvable this whole time.
One small good thing about the time change: it's staying lighter later into the evening now, and last night I got to sit outside on the step with coffee at 6:40 and it wasn't dark yet. That part I don't mind at all. Worth the one bad morning of feeling like I got hit by a truck.