(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

Have you asked anyone what time it is lately?

You’re likely to get an answer that you’d expect forma radio announcer.  “It’s twelve forty-three,” they might ay or maybe, “Two twenty-nine.”

That’s what digital watches and clocks have done for us.  They’ve put us on the same unforgiving unyielding schedule as television newscasters and radio announcers.

We used to tell time as, “quarter to,” or “half past” and “quarter after.”  If you were two or three minutes early or late it didn’t matter that much.  Tell a 12-year-old that it’s quarter after and he or she is likely to look at you like you’re talking French.

And while digital watches became so common, wind-up watches all but disappeared.  Now you’d be hard pressed to find a good wind-up watch.

Now those were watches.  They were cheap and reliable and never needed batteries.

My dad lost a $15 wind-up Timex once while he was baling hay.  He looked all over the field but couldn’t find it.  The next winter when he was feeding cows, he noticed a glint of metal in a bale of hay.  There was the watch.  The crystal was scratched and it was caked with dust and alfalfa leaves.

He wound it up and it keeps good time today.   He wore it everyday until the little gripper grooves on the knob wore off.  The only way you can wind it now is with a pair of pliers.

Once a year when mom cleans out the kitchen junk drawer, she finds the watch.  “Here’s the watch you lost in the baler,” she says.

Dad finds a pair of pliers, winds it up and say, “Look, it still works.”  Then he tosses it back in the drawer.

Find me a digital watch that can match that.

All today’s watches, even the ones still have hands, run on batteries.  The miniature power source keeps your personal time-piece ticking right along.  It’s never fast or slow until the battery runs down.  When that happens you’re stuck, until you buy a new battery you feel disoriented because you’re not quite sure if it’s three twenty-three or three twenty-two.

In the days of wind-up watches you could wind your watch up and ask somebody for the time.  “It’s about half-past three,” they’d say and that would be close enough for you to set your watch and get your life back on track.

And it’s not just watches.  Everywhere you look you find digital clocks.  They are on your alarm clock, computer, microwave and VCR.  All of them keep our lives scheduled by the minute until the power goes out or their batteries run down.

California based Hewlett-Packard Co., recently announced that it has developed a new atomic clock (digital, I’m sure) that is so accurate that it only loses a second every 1.6 million years.  Just think, with a clock like that, you’d never be late for work.

But I do have to admit, even at $54,000, a clock that is accurate to within a second for 1.6 million years is pretty impressive.

Still, I wonder how it would stand up if you ran it through a hay baler.