Yesterday afternoon when my PC screens went blanks and the UPSes started chiming incessantly, there was one thing I wasn’t worried about: The computers clocks coming back up with the right time. I’m pretty sure that even if the computer didn’t have the battery inside to keep the clock up to date, they all connect to an NTP server to update their time, much like cell phones use the cell network to determine the correct time. This is why I’m surprised at the response of the rest of the house clocks when the power goes out.
Sure, there are a few clocks that just lose the time. That’s to be expected. But then there is the bedroom alarm clock. The bedroom alarm clock, like most of the other clocks in the house, goes dark when the power goes out. But when the power comes back on, it hasn’t lost any time. On the other hand, it hasn’t gained any time, either. This is a dangerous business, since it looks close enough to correct - not flashing annoyingly - to convince you not to mess with it, but it’s off significantly enough to get you into work late.
Another strange one is Riley’s bedroom clock. I just bought this thing as a dock for his iPod, but it has a digital clock on the front. It was the cheapest thing I could find online to plug an iPod into, and I didn’t really want the clock, just the speaker, because we were planning on using the iPod for the alarm. In any case, that clock keeps accurate time when the power goes out. How is it that a $12 iPod dock, whose clock is relatively useless when you have the iPod connected, keeps better time than the $600 built-into-the-wall microwave?
We used to get outages more frequently. They’d happen whenever there was a wind storm, which seems pretty frequent around here. These days, power outages only seem to happen for no reason. There was only once in the past two years that I remember a storm causing an outage. Every other time, it’s just gone out in the middle of the day for no reason.
I sometimes think that the power company does repairs in residential neighborhoods during the day like this because they think everyone is at work. Obviously, this causes me trouble. I suppose there’s some sense to it, but it’s pretty inconvenient.
Every time the power goes out, I am reminded that, in spite of having 4 separate UPSes, there are not enough. Here’s a strange annoyance, for example: I have a UPS on the PC, but not the monitors. So I can’t see what I’m doing to shut down the computer properly, only wait for the power to come back on. If I decide to go mobile with the notebook tethered to my phone, I can, but the process is made annoying by the fact that the router is on the UPS (and not the monitor?), so I get a wifi signal, but because Fios’ hardware doesn’t have battery backup for the incoming fiber line (it does, but only for the phone part!), I see a network that can’t go anywhere.
Usually the power doesn’t stay off for too long. I think after that major storm a couple years ago it was out for two days. That’s the longest I remember the power being out in anyplace I’ve lived. When the power came back on, none of the clocks were right. Very odd.
