From the Slashdot thread about the demise of calling time — this comment:
I was just thinking about this the other day for some reason!
One memory I have from youth is taking my oh-so-new-and-cool digital watch and carefully synchronizing it exactly to the beep when I called time. :)
Of course, later I synced my watch one day to the atomic clock, and then for some reason decided to check it against 853-1212. Imagine my geek outrage when freakin’ Time was FORTY SECONDS OFF. I felt like an idiot for carefully syncing my watch all that time.
*sigh* another naive belief of youth falls. (“I mean, it’s the phone company, of course they’d carefully ensure that 853-1212 has the exact time to the millisecond!”)
I used to do the exact same thing with my digital watch (thought I don’t think that was the number in Seattle), except for the atomic clock part. My disillusionment had to wait until now.
I totally relate to this–the geekiness and the naivete (perhaps that’s redundant? there’s something trusting in a certain kind of geek)–I found the story about calling time’s demise very sad indeed.
But then, with the start of school, we’re all a little sentimental. I actually have a child in pre-K–in a building with real, large children, small people who can read. Sigh.–Anne