Call Time!

I remembered something the other day quite by accident.  My wife asked me what time it was from across the room.  Without even thinking about it, I said out loud "At the tone, the time will be 5:45 and 30 seconds... *beeeep*".

As soon as I was finished I blurted out, "Oh, my gosh - do you remember that?  Do you remember how we used to "call time"?  A wave of memories came over us as we recalled that this was something we all used to do.  You'd pick up the phone and "call time" to get the correct time, and a recorded woman's voice would recite the current time down to - It think - the 15 second mark.

As I thought it over, I figured out why it was so common that we did this back then.  We all had watches.  Most had to be wound, and those with batteries would start to slow down.  Wall clocks had batteries, most appliances didn't have batteries.  The big thing was that we didn't have computers or our phones that keep totally accurate time - ALL the time.  We also didn't have electronic readouts on every single appliance and electrical thing we owned.

The bottom line was that in order to make sure that our watches and clocks were accurate, we had to "call time" to check them.
Now days all of our electronic devices are totally accurate and even change to the correct time zones as you travel.

I found a great little article by a guy about it here:

http://littlenuances.blogspot.com/2010/09/remember-when-we-used-to-call-time.html

And apparently, the service just completely and officially ended in a few years back...

http://www.switched.com/2007/08/29/at-the-tone-the-time-will-be-up/

Wish I'd thought about about this before, I would have like to call and listen to the "time lady" one more time...