I had an interesting experience this morning – my cellphone (which is set to get automatic time updates from the cell tower) suddenly reset its time back by 8 hours and as a result my cellphone alarm didnt go off. When I got up it said that the time was 11:30 pm when it was actually 7:30 am. I tried restarting the phone and even forced a network time update but the phone stubbornly said that the time was 11:30 pm and there was nothing I could do about it. When I was driving to work the phone finally set itself to the correct time and the alarm started going off about 2 hours later than it was supposed to. It appears that the cell tower closest to my home has some problem with its time server and has been giving incorrect time updates to all the phones in my area – as soon as I drove away from home the phone connected to a different tower and got an accurate time update.
And while this meant that I was late for work, the more interesting thing is that I’ve had to re-evaluate the reliability of the cellphone clock. I have gotten so used to using the cellphone clock that there was even a period of time when I went without a wrist watch and always used my cell to tell the time. The fact that the cellphone gets time updates from the nearest cell tower has always made it more reliable in my eyes. I never had to worry about day light savings times and the time would automatically set itself to the current timezone when I was traveling. I do not own an alarm clock and both Nithya and I rely on exclusively on our cellphone alarms. Even in at work we always assume that the time from the ZoneTag cellphone is more accurate than the time from the users digital camera. And while this is usually true, this mornings mixup has driven home the fact that cellphones aren’t 100% infallible – guess its time to finally buy that alarm clock.
[tags]time, clock, mobile, cellphone, network time, time update[/tags]
