The Red Dot

Kitchen things all tell me what time it is. Microwave oven. Wall oven. My coffeemaker. Her coffeemaker.

Sometimes they agree on the time of day, sometimes not. When they don’t, I have to wonder which is right. Is a microwave smarter than a coffee pot? Does it matter which is newer?

If the two coffeemakers don’t agree, and one is a minute ahead of the other, I wonder which one got there first. And why.

When I was a kid, there was one clock in the kitchen. Digital wasn’t a thing yet, so it had 3 hands and said General Electric. If you can’t trust a GE clock, there is something wrong with you.

Unless there was a red dot just under the 12. The red dot was not visible unless the clock had a power outage. When the power went out, the red dot dropped down into its little space behind the hole in the clockface. When the power came back on, the red dot stayed put, so the educated observer would know the clock had stopped – and, by inference, the time displayed was wrong.

Clocks in those days didn’t flash 12:00.........12:00.........12:00.

See, not every change is progress.