At Large - Roger Moroney: Digital watches just a big wind up

I used to have a wristwatch which I hated. I bought it cheaply overseas and it was one of those "trendy" jobs that did not have hands.
They called them digital watches.
Very flash and very shiny, and they were solely responsible for wrecking centuries of fine and traditional time-keeping and time-offering.
You could ask a chap with a watch, equipped with an hour, minute and second hand (which was actually the third hand) what the time was and he would reply "it is 27 minutes past the hour of seven".
Digital, through the adoption of dreadful little electronic numerals, produced a fast-food version of telling the time. "Six twenty-seven."
Which was just fine, if you were concerned about saving four or five seconds a day when it came to kindly telling someone what the time was.
I passed through the digital watch stage and now, like I suspect the great majority do, wear something I can wind up.
Because when a watch with hands loses time, or the battery goes west, then all you have to do is pull on the small winder spindle and turn it accordingly to set things up in accordance with life, the universe and time.
What I discovered, twice in the space of a year, was that a digital watch had no such simplicity.
They are like the old VCR timer-set recording procedures ... basically, impossible.
They were equipped with not a winding spindle but with four or five very small plastic-topped buttons.
The only information on what these buttons did were contained in the instructions, which was an unfolding sheet of multi-pleated paper which delivered the secrets on how to set the time in 17 languages ... including butchered English.
"Press Button A once before press Button C twice to set day of date in month require."
It was a good thing they were generally cheap to buy ... because most digital watches were often killed at that point. It was back in the digital-hugging late 80s and early 90s that jewellers, twice a year, were pressed into frantic service.
For as daylight saving arrived, and seven months later departed, the owners of digital watches which had come equipped with a sheet of multi-pleated paper which delivered the secrets on how to set the time in 17 languages, including butchered English, would be sent into a lather. For they would have to re-set the time.
While those with watches equipped with hands sniffily walked by, making a split-second adjustment to ensure an hour had been added or subtracted, the digital fraternity would shuffle and howl in doorways and mutter dark oaths as time, for them, stood still.
And so it was, for those who succumbed to speaking the time in digital tongues, a terrible time of the year.
Terrible too for watchmakers and jewellers who arguably had better things to do than deal with a snaking queue of people all holding digital watches an hour out of sync with the rest of the land and seeking assistance.
I solved it because unlike the watches I have owned since my digital was crushed under heel of my boot, I don't like being wound up.
Another daylight saving dilemma solved.
Now I just have to try and work out what time it is in Australia ... and how not to feel guilty having a beer at 11 when the sun is traditionally over the yard-arm. Because it's really only 10 o'clock. It is a good thing that my liver possesses a digital watch.
And this brings to mind the occasion at midnight when 1999 became 2000.
There had been unease and fear about what "the machines" would all do at the midnight hour when the new millennium emerged. Computer technicians and consultants made small fortunes as the uncertain and fearful believed their digital lives were about to get fried and beat paths to their doors.
Then midnight came ... and nothing happened.
Fellow midnight-greeting acquaintance Pete Mooney told the masses at the Sound Shell that all was well. Nothing had gone amiss. The power was still with us. All fears allayed.
Later, I congratulated Pete on another fine celebration he had been a strong heart of, but in passing noted that it was NOT just after midnight after all ... for daylight saving was in place. It was only eight minutes past 11 ... midnight and the potential chaos had yet to arrive.
As the revellers all danced and sang and jollied away, he shook his head and laughed, and simply said something like "let's just keep that to ourselves for now".
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.