A timely dilemma
We’ll spring forward this weekend, bringing that lose-an-hour thing that will leave us feeling sleepy all morning and wide awake at midnight. It will take just a day or so to reset my internal clock.
It’s that other clock that’s the problem.
The dashboard clock on my Subaru Forester has never been reliable, and now it’s as wonky as my printer. And the time change will make it worse.
Two days after I bought the car in 2016, I noticed that the dashboard clock was a minute slow when compared to the top-of-the-hour radio newscasts. I should have used the car manual to look up how to adjust the clock right then, but what’s a minute, really; or I could have driven back to the dealer to make them fix it, but that would be so unlike me.
Three months later it was two minutes slow, which again didn’t seem like a lot, but I’ve had the car six years, and by now that otherwise reliable set of wheels is starting to make me late.
Toss in an autumn fall-back, and I’m really tangled up. One morning last November I was driving to a film shoot and as I pulled out of my driveway I saw 1:14 on the dashboard and had a little panic attack. If that clock was right, I was already two hours late. It wasn’t, and I wasn’t, but, oh, boy, the confusion.
Figuring out the time while I’m driving requires a series of mental calculations that would fill the chalkboard in a trigonometry class. I’m picturing my high school trig class, the one in which the young teacher in the flippy hairdo would fill the chalkboard with rows of curly lines and loops – thetas and cosines, I think. By the second semester I’d stalled and was lucky to get a C out of the course. After that the left side of my brain abdicated.
In the car manual, there are whole pages dedicated to dashboard management. I did try to fix things once, holding the fat manual open while I pushed and pulled those little levers and buttons on the steering wheel; I screwed things up even worse, not only further messing up the clock but also losing the screen that tells me how many miles of fuel I have left.
Eventually I determined the clock algorithm: add two hours and six minutes. Then came fall and its lost hour, plus the clock has always been a bit of a sloth, and I lost track. What time is it? Give me a half-hour and a slide rule and I’ll tell you. As of now, here is the equation: t = c + 66 x 1/2 > 2 x 1/4, and pi.
The funny thing is, every couple of weeks I get a letter from a Subaru dealer offering to buy my car. If only they knew what they were asking. The car drives, but you will always be late. Or early. I don’t know for sure.
And so come this weekend when we turn time forward, my car clock will be an hour closer to correct than it is today. No – wait a minute. We’re going forward in time, not back, so to figure the right time I’ll have to add six minutes plus one more hour. Is that right? Anyone?
I guess what I’m saying is if I’m late – or early – it’s not my fault.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.