When my wife’s alarm clock went off, I pried my eyes open to look at my alarm clock. It showed 4:45am. I was a bit confused (a normal state at any hour of the morning), and wondered why she was getting up so early. She told me it was the usual time (5:45am).

Yeah, right. My alarm clock runs on atomic time, and automatically adjusts to the proper time. This is useful during power outages, as it will be one less clock I have to set after the power is restored.

Until I realized that this was the last Monday of the month of October. And then I remembered that my alarm clock was built before the change to the start and end of Daylight Savings Time. Which is now the first weekend of November, not the last weekend of October.

Which makes my alarm clock as confused as I am in the morning.

And now I remember that I have several other atomic clocks in my house that are similarly confused.