The Clocks They Are a-Changin - Rian van Spaandonk

If you are anything like me, then you have spent the last eight weeks or so in a state of ongoing spatio-temporal confusion. If you are nothing like me, you will probably proceed to tell me this is because I don’t have a watch. Wrong. (I have a watch. I just haven’t had time to get a new battery for it…) In Vienna, it´s normally no problem to get through life without a watch.  You gently make your way from clock to clock. Sometimes the clock belongs to a jeweller’s, sometimes it’s one of those clocks that is also a thermometer, but most of the clocks in Vienna are found on street corners. Mighty handy. Except of course when they stop working. Over the past two months, all my favourite clocks have taken turns in freezing, throwing me into a most inconvenient limbo. Doing a quick shop before work, I find myself running home because the clock at the beginning of Meidlinger Hauptstrasse stubbornly tells me it is noon (or midnight), when I know it is not. Walking from university to my work, I am forced into a trot, because the clock by Universitätsstrasse is somehow stuck on midnight (or noon). Then not long ago I saw a group of men working on one of my clocks. But they just changed the clock face. It suddenly read Wiener Städtische (aka Vienna Insurance Group). I spent the rest of the day trying to decide whether or not it was a bad thing that my clocks had been privatized. I decided it was a good thing. At least I now knew who to blame if I was ever late for work or an appointment! But then I had an unsettling dream. All the street-corner clocks were displaying a different time, which led me to write a furious letter to the Vienna Insurance Group, claiming damages for my missed appointments. The dream ended badly. I didn´t receive any compensation; instead, a never-ending stream of advertising for insurance policies kept appearing, filling up my letterbox and eventually my flat. I woke up in a sweat, grateful for the absence of brochures in my bed and determined to buy a watch battery immediately. Ever since, I have been making my way through Vienna relaxed as ever, occasionally glancing at my watch and comparing with the street-corner clocks. Is it me, or do the new, decorated clock faces seem to grin?