The Twice‑Yearly Clock‑Changing Fiasco.

Twice a year, civilisation collapses. I’m not talking about elections, or when your broadband goes down and you have to make eye contact with your family. I’m talking about the ancient ritual known as Changing the Clocks, a tradition apparently designed by a committee of sleep‑deprived druids who wanted to see how far they could push society before it snapped.

Every March and October, millions of responsible adults people who hold jobs, raise children, and can operate a microwave without supervision are reduced to shambling, confused wrecks wandering around their homes muttering, “Is it now? Or is it then? Are we forward? Are we backward? Am I backward?”

This is because no one, in the entire history of humanity, has ever remembered which way the clocks go without first reciting the sacred mantra: “Spring forward, fall back.” This sounds helpful until you realise it was clearly invented by someone who lived in a place where seasons behave themselves. Meanwhile, the rest of us are standing in the rain in mid‑April thinking, “Is this spring? Is this autumn? Why is the sky doing that?”

And of course, some clocks change themselves. These are the smug clocks. The clocks that live in your phone, your laptop, and your car (if your car is younger than the average cheese). These clocks update automatically, silently judging you as you stumble around the house trying to remember how to change the oven clock, which requires pressing a combination of buttons that, according to the manual, should only be attempted by a trained bomb‑disposal technician.

Then there are the clocks that pretend to update automatically but don’t. These are the traitor clocks. They lull you into a false sense of security, then reveal ... usually at the worst possible moment ... that they have not changed at all. You discover this when you arrive at work an hour early, alone in the building, setting off the alarm system and having to explain to security that you are not a burglar, just an idiot.

But the worst offender the Mount Doom of timekeeping is the microwave clock. No one knows how to change it. No one. Scientists have tried. World leaders have convened summits. NASA once sent a team of engineers who returned broken, muttering, “It just keeps blinking 00:00… it never stops…”

So twice a year, we all gather in front of the microwave like medieval peasants consulting an oracle, pressing buttons at random until something changes. Sometimes the time changes. Sometimes the grill turns on. Sometimes the microwave begins counting down from 30 minutes for no reason. We accept this. We move on.

And let’s not forget the people who insist they “love” the clock change. These are the same people who enjoy assembling flat‑pack furniture and think quinoa is “fun.” They say things like, “Oh, I adore the extra hour of sleep!” These people are lying. No one gets an extra hour of sleep. What you get is an extra hour of lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering why your body clock hates you and whether time is even real.

Meanwhile, the government keeps hinting that one day we might stop doing this. They’ve been hinting this for decades. They never actually do it, of course, because they know that if they took away the clock change, society would lose its last remaining shared experience. Without it, we’d have nothing left to talk about except the weather, and we’ve already exhausted that topic.

So we carry on. Twice a year. Like confused migrating birds who’ve lost the instruction manual.

And when it’s all over — when the clocks are finally correct, the microwave is still blinking, and you’ve spent three days feeling like you’ve been lightly concussed you tell yourself, “Next time, I’ll be ready.”

You won’t be.

No one ever is.