The Clock Story

During my recent trip back home to India, I got a digital clock for my parents that had LED display on it, to help them see the time at night easily. My parents thought it was a great gift and my dad went and got a converter for the power right away. When my dad was at the store buying it, apparently the store guy told my dad that American clocks will show a different time and will not work in India. We were laughing about it all the way through setting up the clock.

After much discussion on where the best place for the clock was, we set it up. Everything was fine for the first five minutes. After that, the clock started slowing down (or at least we started noticing it after that). We kept checking it every so often, and the clock just kept losing more time with time. My parents could not believe that an American clock was not working properly. So they kept checking the time aganist Sun News and Jaya News as they are polar opposites. Still the clock was losing time. After about ten hours, our great clock was four hours behind. Go figure!

Based on somebody's idea that there was a 30-minute difference between American and Indian time (whatever that means) and that there was only one store that could adjust for that in Chennai, my dad made a trip all the way to Mount Road to take the clock to the best clock store in town (did you know that it is P.Orr & Sons?). The guy at that store said that we had to have a battery installed and that would take care of this problem (even though the manual says that the battery is only needed for power backup). So my dad purchased that battery in a store next to P.Orr & Sons (apparently this battery is not available everywhere). My dad was short by fifty rupees but the battery guy was trusting enough to let him bring it later.

So, we installed and "charged" the battery and then set the time and started watching it again. It came to a point when I thought that my dad was going to start recording the time like in a lab experiment. Still the clock was losing time like before (if not more!). My mom would keep unplugging the clock as it was showing the wrong time and interrupting my dad's experiment. Meanwhile, the battery guy would call us up asking for his fifty rupees; and my parents would tell him that the battery he gave us is not working properly. At this point, I was ready to give up on this clock and get them a different one in India. But they did not want to give up and so upon my mom's instruction, myself and my dad made our follow up trip to the best clock store in town (we both had to go to get the story right).

The guy who had told my dad to get that battery was nowhere to be seen. So we went to a different guy and he wouldn't even look at this clock as he thinks all digital clocks from America don't work. The service was so poor that I did not even want to stay there. So I told my dad that we can get another clock and we went to the battery store to pay up the fifty rupees. What I really wanted to do was return the battery but it seems that you can't return it once you have opened it. After having been used to returning anything that you don't want in US, this was a little hard to get used to. We went to the battery store around 11.30 am and the store was closed. My dad went to the next store to ask about this store and they didn't know anything about it. My dad (against my wishes) asked the other store if he can give them the fifty rupees and they can give it to the battery store and they said that they don't talk to the battery store people. So we left that store. The highlight of this trip was the sugarcane juice we both drank before coming back home and the quality father-daughter time we spent together.

By this time, I was blaming myself for bringing this clock as my parents were feeling sorry that they are not able to use the gift I got for them. But anyway, we went on a search for a similar clock, and apparently LED clocks are rare to find in India. But finally, we found a store with a few different kinds of digital clocks. One was with seconds and the other one was without. I thought we should get the one without the seconds but my mom wanted me to call my dad. So I called and asked him and he immediately said we should get the one with the seconds. I asked him why and he said that is how we will know immediately when it stops working. I did not have any response to this and so we got the one with the seconds. We set it up and it works fine and most importantly, doesn't lose time.

I told my parents that I will return the clock after I get back to US but that I will set it up and check once before that. So here I come back and set the clock up and lo and behold, the clock works fine. That was not what I had expected. I was speechless after all the things I had to go through with this stupid clock. The theory is that it had something to do with the converter (by someone who knows more about electronics than I do, as that did not occur to me at all) and I guess that could be.

We decided not to return the clock and keep it in our home in US, as now we have a history with this clock. I told my parents that the clock works here and they didn't seem as surprised as I expected them to be, but my dad wanted me to spank it for not working there. But they seem to like the other one though.

The moral of this story (at least for me) is not to buy electronic stuff from the US to India. For one it is very difficult to find a place to repair it and the other thing is that there are lots of affordable electronic stuff in India now. They are all made in China, right?

Regardless, this clock turned out to be one of the funniest episodes during my trip and is still making for interesting and laughable conversations. I only wish this was a fictional story, but sometimes, life is more interesting than fiction. Hope all your clocks show the right time!