Wednesday, September 26, 2007

How will I know what time it is?

I just tried to call time and the phone number has been discontinued as of September 19th! What the heck? Has there been a replacement service issued? I'm going to have to look into this!

How else will I know EXACTLY what time it is down to a 10-second interval?!

Well, according to this article, it's not coming back and we were one of the two states (along with Nevada) holding out on eliminating the need to call time. I'm so bummed. I've been calling time my whole life!! Boo. It's like a whole new era.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

...You...you're kidding, right? It's 2007! There's like 8 devices in your home that get the correct time from pulses in the electrical current, or sync to a hyper-exact military atomic supercomputer buried under Colorado.

Though I admit there's a certain nostalgic value to dialing a phone (Bonus: it's a rotary phone!) and hearing a nice recorded lady tell you "At the tone, the time will be...."

Stephanie said...

I know it's 2007!!! But, I love calling time because sometimes you just need to know what time it is and it's the easiest way.

About once a month, I crawl under a desk to adjust our time keeping system at work and then have to adjust the computer from my office, so calling time is the easiest way to make sure that they're both on the same exact second!

Anonymous said...

Actually your phone is one of those devices that gets the time automatically. Your Treo, like all cell phones currently sold in the US, has a GPS receiver. I know you don't care how GPS works, but an important side effect is knowing the time accurate to +/- 340 nanoseconds. (These GPS receivers are legally required so that 911 operators can find your cell phone in an emergency - they are NOT secretly used as government tracking devices. I know because the government told me. ;-)

Anonymous said...

You can always go to http://time.gov or if you want a telephone number there is (303) 499-7111 (long distance) with is the NIST Telephone time of day service. Also as mentioned your Treo can be set to get it's time from the cell network, this is actually very accurate as all phone carriers (cell or land line) use the US atomic clock to set their network time.

Here is some more information:
http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/service/time-computer.html