I have never liked digital clocks, because when I look at one I have to translate it into a clock face in my head. it’s been decades now (and she is dead) but I remember being shocked when a friend of my Mom’s told me it was the opposite way for her. She said “I never really understood time until digital clocks were invented” which blew my mind.
a ticking clock is my favorite white noise because I find it incredibly relaxing
I can’t disagree. I no longer make plans with people who can’t be bothered to be on time for me.
I am relentlessly punctual as a byproduct of a paranoia about being late. Dunno where that comes from. I’m early to everything, primarily because I allow all the worst-case estimates to tolerance stack me to death. My wife does not play that game, yet through some all-different process I’ve never gotten my head around, she’s as bad at being early as I am. Together, we are the couple that sits in the car outside a friend’s house for 20 minutes waiting for a reasonable time to ring the doorbell.
I understand that one of the reasons the military loves to do flyovers of sporting events is because it gives the pilots a chance to practice their time-on-target runs. I do about the same thing in real life, using my perpetual earliness to give me time to prep for my entrance. I have the skills to walk into a restaurant plus or minus about 5 seconds of my reservation time. Same with the doctor’s office and etc. it’s weird.
You’d think with that, I’d be glued to my Apple Watch and my iPhone. Nope. I’m all analog and am a giant mechanical watch nerd. The fact that you can get anything approaching precision for a device powered solely by gravity (winding as I swing my arms around through the day), driven by tiny springs and hand-cut gears, and regulated by the painstaking manipulation of tiny weighted screws, is mind-blowing to me.
The watch I’m wearing right now was just affordable and approachable enough that I have done my own regulating. I bought all the tools and got after it. Its long-term average, which of course I track daily, is about +1.9 seconds per day.
My nicest watch, a chronograph, is complicated (and expensive) to the degree that I’d be terrified to open it. So it’s regulated to the standards of the shop where it was made and is running +.8 seconds a day over the last year.
I have a bunch of other watches at various points on the spectrum, and a list as long as your arm of what I’d go get at different amounts on the windfall scale, but the one compromise I make towards quartz precision is my ‘swimming at the beach with my dog’ watch, one that I don’t mind if saltwater ever wins the battle. It was designed with the beach in mind, anyway.
