Technology gone awry (part 2)

We had a very good day today at Mobile World Congress and a number of good stories that could be told here.  But the simplest is this: how difficult can it be to set a clock (or two)?  The answer: very difficult!  This is one of those things that has to be seen to be believed.  Especially after what we (our company) does is master the complexities of delivering mobile video with quality and a multitude of applications.

Yesterday, during the set up phase, I was given the task (about par for my level) to figure out how to set the two clocks that would be in our conference rooms.  Never mind that we had amazing technical people setting up video demos with the right menus and interfaces.  These two special clocks are wireless devices that are tied to GPS and satellites and have four timezones, all of them U.S.  I would set the time, and they would just keep spinning around, never stopping on the correct time, or any time!

So, I picked it up again this morning and fiddled with them before and after meetings.  Finally, after er – reading the directions, I set them to midnight, unplugged the batteries, set the time zone to EST, and adjusted the time to the right number of hours from CET and waited for the hours and minutes and seconds to spin around before landing at the right time.  (Kind of like the roulette wheel – place your bets, place your bets!).  Eventually, I fixed the first one and got it to the right time and Karen hung it on the wall.

The second one was an S.O.B.  Despite everything, it kept spinning and I finally placed it face down in the second conference room so it would not be an embarrassment to us.  Later, I ran through the steps again and AND, I finally manually adjusted the time and did everything else and miracle of miracles, it told the right time, was hung and there it is tonight.

Now, how many of us long for the days when you actually just set a clock and it did not have it’s own ideas of what the time was and second guess you!!??

Oh, did I mention that one of my watches is also GPS radio-controlled but aligns itself with one of three global time synch clocks?  Luckily, only I know if the time is right or not