I have no idea how to change the time displayed by my car clock. You would think a marvel of modern engineering that can cruise unvaryingly at any given speed of which it is capable just by flicking a switch on the steering wheel, that can tell me without hesitation how many miles I have left in the tank, and can warm my buttocks on cold days, could at least have a method of advancing the clock an hour without having to resort to burying chicken bones in the centre of chalk pentangles on the Worm’s Head at midnight of the solstice. A friend of mine tried changing her clock once, only to find all her dashboard messages were now in Spanish (props Jude!). She now knows how to say “the left back door is open” in several languages. The whole experience is so terrifying, I have opted to mentally adjust the time on the clock according to the time of year, or glance at my phone, magnetically affixed to the dashboard, which does the time change by magic.
For six months of the year, my car clock is right. For the other six it exists somewhere outside the space/time continuum and I have to perform mental quadratic equations to get a rough approximation. If I can talk to my car and tell it to call my son, or to set an alert to pick up some ham the next time I’m in Sainsbury’s, why can’t I just say, “Clock. Advance one hour for the next six months”?
To add insult to injury, the clock itself is not even visible unless the sun is in the right direction, or it’s after sunset. The picture above is of an old style clock, the kind that disappeared decades ago when digital took over. To change the time, I turned the knob at the bottom right hand corner. That’s how it should be. Car manufacturers should take note. You might think RTFM, but have you seen the manuals on modern cars? They are either four inches thick, or have to be downloaded in PDF format and if you search for “clock” you get 473 hits – none of which have any relevance to changing the time.
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