2013-07-06

Time for a change

Sometimes, change comes easier to me than I really expect it to.

About two months ago, I noticed that my watch was ten minutes slow.

Jokes about alien abduction and "missing time" aside, this disturbed me because I rely on my watch to tell me what time it is.  More so than the average person, I suspect, I am a little obsessive about knowing what time it is.  So suddenly being in a position where I didn't know what time it was was very disturbing.

I reset the watch and carried on.  A couple of weeks later, the watch was suddenly five minutes slow.

This really put me into  a situation because now I was wearing a device that I couldn't trust.

At work, I am the documentation chaser.  I am always on people to create and update documentation, for my use and for the rest of the team.  And one of my principles is that the only thing worse than no documentation is wrong documentation

Similarly, the wrong time is worse than not knowing what time it actually is.

So I stopped wearing my watch.

I've worn a watch pretty much nonstop since I was 12, so call that 30 years or so.  And I worried that I would not be able to make the transition to not having a timepiece on my wrist at all times.

It turns out that the time is usually close at hand even when I don't have a watch.  We are surrounded by clocks and appliances with clocks and computers and tablets and phones.  So I end up with only a very few daily instances when I don't have immediate access to the current time.

I have adjusted far better than I expected.

Maybe I am not so set in my ways as I thought I am.