Microwave Clock Reset Hotline Receives 4,000th Call; Operator Now Weeps Softly Into Handset

The county’s Microwave Clock Reset Hotline celebrated its 4,000th caller Tuesday, a milestone operator Sheila Vargas marked by weeping softly into her headset while patiently explaining, for the 4,000th time, that the ‘Clock’ button must be pressed before the numbers, not after.

‘Congratulations, caller,’ Vargas said, her voice cracking. ‘You are our 4,000th caller. Your prize is the correct time on your microwave.’

The hotline, launched in anticipation of the November 1 fall-back, operates from a converted broom closet in the county annex, where three volunteers field an average of 312 calls daily from residents whose microwaves have displayed 7:42 since a power outage in 2019.

‘The 2 a.m. repeat hour is our Super Bowl,’ said hotline coordinator Dale Pruitt, who personally handles the overnight shift because, in his words, ‘someone has to be awake when the hour happens twice, and it might as well be me, since I’m awake anyway, staring at my own microwave.’

Callers report a wide range of microwave predicaments, including the increasingly common ‘double blink,’ in which the clock displays 12:00 in two time zones simultaneously, and the rare ‘triple blink,’ documented only once, on a microwave purchased during a going-out-of-business sale in 2003.

The hotline’s most frequent question — ‘Do I hold it or press it?’ — has been answered 1,847 times. The second most frequent — ‘Is there a man I can talk to?’ — has been answered by Dale Pruitt 1,846 times.

Funding for the hotline runs through December, at which point the county plans to redirect resources to the annual ‘Smoke Detector Chirp at 3 A.M.’ task force.