Exhausted by the semiannual ritual of clock adjustment, local resident Gary Muldowney, 47, announced Monday that he is seceding from the time zone system entirely and will henceforth live at ‘a permanent 2:47,’ a time he described as ‘late enough to feel productive, early enough to feel young.’
‘I have changed my clocks four hundred times,’ Muldowney said, standing beside his kitchen clock, which he has stopped with a piece of masking tape. ‘I am done. From now on, when I say I’ll meet you at three, I mean my three. Do the math yourselves.’
Muldowney’s wife, Linda, confirmed she has ‘stopped asking questions,’ and has begun scheduling her own activities in what she calls ‘Linda Standard Time,’ which runs approximately 11 minutes ahead of her husband’s and ‘is honestly just a coping mechanism.’
The couple’s children have adapted with remarkable speed. Their 12-year-old daughter now tells friends she will arrive ‘sometime between Gary 2:47 and Linda 2:58,’ a window her friends have learned to interpret as ‘probably on time.’
The Time Zone Ombudsman issued a statement Tuesday acknowledging Muldowney’s declaration but noting that ‘personal time zones are not recognized under Section 4 of the Temporal Harmony Act,’ and that his trash will still be collected at 6 a.m. sharp, ‘regardless of what his kitchen clock says.’
Muldowney was last seen resetting his car’s dashboard clock to 2:47. The dashboard clock, a 2011 model with three buttons and no instructions, reportedly ‘laughed at him.’
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