Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

Whoever said, “If you own more than one clock, you’ll never know what time it is,” spoke the frustrating truth. We have clocks everywhere in our house — five in the kitchen alone — and I never know which one to follow. Each is a few seconds or a minute one way or that from the others. Thank goodness most of them don’t chime, or we’d really go bonkers.

Today I followed the wrong clock and was late for an appointment by ten minutes. It wasn’t a make or break kind of deal — like being late for a job interview or a command performance. Still I’m thinking we should stop this obsession with timepieces, decorative or functional, and set our internal and external tick-tocking to one clock, remove the batteries on the others, move their hands to noon (or midnight), and call it a day.

When daylight savings time comes around in the spring or disappears in the fall, we dash madly from clock to clock in our home, our cars, and our jewelry boxes. And, when this semi-annual rite of passage is complete, I’m willing to bet not one clock is set to Greenwich Mean Time.

I checked GMT on Google® and here is what the official web site had to say: “Greenwich, England has been the home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) since 1884. GMT is sometimes called Greenwich Meridian Time because it is measured from the Greenwich Meridian Line at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Greenwich is the place from where all time zones are measured.” In addition, GMT is always on the same time. It never springs forward for daylight savings so there’s no reason to fall back in the fall. So there is part of the year that, even if I were super accurate, I wouldn’t be on GMT at all.

I don’t know what techniques the current timekeepers of GMT use. But they must be pretty impressive since this is the world’s time clock we’re talking about, and there’s probably not a lot of margin for error. At the time I visited the site, there were 268 other visitors, according to a notice on the home page. I felt comforted by that, knowing other humans were probably struggling with their own time issues. If I see a lot of clocks for sale in the classifieds, I’ll know some of them reached the same conclusion I have.