Time's not on his side (07/16/208)

There's an old song by the group Chicago called "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?"

It could have been the theme music to my Sunday.

I noticed Friday that my watch was running a little slow, and on Saturday I re-set it to pick up a few minutes that had been lost.

It's a good watch, but nothing fancy.

Like most folks my age, I still remember getting my first watch. It was a Christmas present, and it was a very big deal indeed.

Watches were in those days.

Today, they're practically disposable.

Unless you're crazy enough to spend your money on something like a Rolex, chances are your wrist is home to something workmanlike and replaceable. If you're a woman, you may think of it more as a piece of jewelry than anything else. If you're under 20, you may not have one at all; your cellphone tells you the time.

This particular watch was an impulse buy on my part. I was on a flight home from a project in the former Soviet Union and was feeling a little punchy when the flight attendant passed through pushing duty-free shopping. The watch looked nice. It was shiny. And the price was right.

And it worked pretty well, though I've never figured out all the "chronograph" features it has and I'm never able to get my bifocals properly adjusted to read some of its smaller numbers.

Then, Sunday morning, it stopped. It almost made it to 10:30 a.m. but fell short by about a minute and a half.

"Do you have another watch?" my wife asked.

Of course I had another watch. I had a treasure trove of formerly favorite watches that needed new batteries.

In fact, within short order, I found an outdoorsy watch - a Father's Day present - that had proven to be waterproof on several occasions, a funny-looking watch that came in the mail after I answer an Apple computer survey, a watch I'd been given several birthdays ago, a watch that was given away as part of a promotion at Burger King, and a watch I'd received on the fifth anniversary of the ground-breaking for Jaytec (now FCC).

None of them worked.

The only watch I found that could actually tell me the time was an old Russian pocket watch I'd bought at a flea market. And since our Sunday plans were to go to a baseball game, that was hardly suitable.

Now, the sensible thing would have been to put on my non-working watch and wear it anyway since we were going to be out in the sun all afternoon. But that was the sensible thing to do, and instead I have a bit of sunburn where my watch should have been.

At first, not having a watch seemed a little empowering, freeing me from the rigors of the clock. But I was amazed how often I looked at the spot on my left wrist where the watch should have been.

What the heck, I thought. I can always rely on the scoreboard clock.

Wrong again.

Maybe it's because the Fort Wayne team is moving to a new stadium next season, but they seem to be a lot less attentive to mainttaining the scoreboard than they used to be.

As game time approached, I was startled to read that the time was 1:93.

Now I have no problem with digital watches. I don't even have a problem with the metric system. But the last I knew there were 60 minutes in an hour, not 100.

Puzzled, I watched the scoreboard change to 1:94, then 1:95, then 1:96.

What, I wondered, would happened after 1:99? Would it be 2 p.m.?

Nope. It was 1:50 p.m.

Apparently one of the lights was shorting out, making the 4 look like a 9. It took a little getting used to, but as the game wore on I got the hang of it.

We left about 4:99 p.m. - that is, 4:49 p.m. - and headed for home.

I was already making plans to get the battery replaced in my watch and was wondering whether to give FCC my Jaytec watch for the company archives when we rolled through Berne.

That's where I saw a digital sign that apparently had the time right but listed the temperature as "31 F."

I wonder if Chicago ever considered a song entitled, "Does Anybody Really Know How Hot It Is?"[[In-content Ad]]