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Clocks & Watches Stopping / Malfunctioning

The central theme of your argument seems claer and indeed has merits but is not helped by the use of polarising and 'extreme' deifinition, especially when incorrect.
ie,
Arbitrary ; Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle
Subjective ; Proceeding from or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world.

Despite any suspicions you may have, this is well-meant.
 
"and I've never a clue when something happened or how old I am, "

Come on. It is this sort of statement that makes the rest of a post about stopping clocks appear to be farsical nonsense made up by people with a limited sense of their surroundings. If you just tell me the year, even I will have a clue. Actually, that would be a more probative clue, there are several clues to your age available just by reading thhis one post.

Some clues that are available but that you apparently cannot recognize the significance of are those little cards you get now and then. If it has a picture of a purple dinosaur on it, you are likely under 5. If it says Happy sweet 16, you are sixteen. If it says register for the draft, you are 17 or 18. If it says, "congratulations" and offers you a discount at Mike's Liquors, you are 21. If they say time for a prostrate exam, you are over 45. If it offers a trial issue of AARP monthly, you are at least 50.
 
Are you you saying that for a phenomena to exist

1. it must be understood by anyone experiencing it.
2. such an observer must be able to describe it eloquently.
3. there is a minimum mental-age requirement for observers.

If that is the case I had better rethink my belief in God, after all these years of disregarding churches and religions and all that ridiculous 'mystical' mimbo-jumbo.
 
You Really Are, Eh>?

Rube said:
"and I've never a clue when something happened or how old I am, "

Come on. It is this sort of statement that makes the rest of a post about stopping clocks appear to be farsical nonsense made up by people with a limited sense of their surroundings. If you just tell me the year, even I will have a clue. Actually, that would be a more probative clue, there are several clues to your age available just by reading thhis one post.

Some clues that are available but that you apparently cannot recognize the significance of are those little cards you get now and then. If it has a picture of a purple dinosaur on it, you are likely under 5. If it says Happy sweet 16, you are sixteen. If it says register for the draft, you are 17 or 18. If it says, "congratulations" and offers you a discount at Mike's Liquors, you are 21. If they say time for a prostrate exam, you are over 45. If it offers a trial issue of AARP monthly, you are at least 50.
Click to expand...

a rube, that is.
 
Rube said:
"Come on. It is this sort of statement that makes the rest of a post about stopping clocks appear to be farsical nonsense made up by people with a limited sense of their surroundings.
Click to expand...
Then you said:

If it has a picture of a purple dinosaur on it, you are likely under 5. If it says Happy sweet 16, you are sixteen. If it says register for the draft, you are 17 or 18. If it says, "congratulations" and offers you a discount at Mike's Liquors, you are 21. If they say time for a prostrate exam, you are over 45. If it offers a trial issue of AARP monthly, you are at least 50.
Click to expand...


Try contributing one of your own stories instead of:

"making the rest of a post about stopping clocks appear to be farsical nonsense made up by people with a limited sense of their surroundings"

Well?:blah:
 
My sister

My sister had problems with watches. She gave one quartz watch to my mother and it worked on her. She was such a tom boy that I thought maybe it was just her active lifestyle, but I expect electromagnetism could be involved as well--perhaps something electro-chemical in her perspiration.

As for being able to tell the time accurately without a watch, we all have biological clocks and the ability to read certain clues about the time, such as the angle of the sun. With practice you can wake up at your chosen time without an alarm clock, although I use an alarm and a back-up system myself.

My mother feeds her cat every night at the same time and if she is late you can hear it meowing by its dish within five minutes of din-din time. Since cats don't read clocks, the cat's internal clock or external clues must be accurate within five or ten minutes over a period of 24 hours, which isn't bad.
 
I can't wear watches, cuz I was a slave in a past life and wearing things around my wrists makes me uneasy.

I can do that "starting watches with hand heat" thing - but I have pretty hot hands. C'mere, I'll show ya...

pinkle
 
I was away from home recently for 3 weeks, only passing by to pick up mail, and check the place was ok. When I moved back in again, I noticed my wall clock had stopped. No unusual, because it is battery powered, but seeing the last battery lasted at least a year and its been six months since I changed the battery, slightly annoying.

I went to bed, meaning to pick up a new battery in the morning, but in the morning (you guessed it), the clock had started again.

Did it miss me, did it think it was wasting its time ticking away when noone was home, or is it just coincidence?
 
1949. I sat in my parents' kitchen with Mom, Dad and my paternal Grandfather.

Grnandpa looked up at the clock mounted high above the sink.

"Isn't that the clock Mom and I gave you for your wedding?" (in 1938)

"Yes," Mom answered. "And it's never given us a single second's trouble."

The clock died forever within the next 10 or 15 minutes.
 
Does anyone have problems with this? I sometimes have luck with watches, but I'm starting to realise I've had more wall clocks that I've had hot dinners, so I'm giving up on them. I've had cheap ones, expensive ones, and a whole bunch in between. The one I've got now is like the last one - the batteries are fine, and it hasn't stopped - the hands just won't go. Very annoying!

Any thoughts or ideas?

PS. The electronic clocks in my car, computer and phone are okay.
 
Many people have reported the stopped-watch phenomenon; but, stopped wall clocks are new to me.

Electrical interference in your living quarters?
 
I used to have problems with watches when I was young. Back then, they were all wind-up types. But no problems in the last few decades.

If your dodgy wall-clocks are all electric, Josella14, have you tried wind-up ones instead?

(By chance, today I was at a flea-market where one stall had reconditioned wind-up clocks for sale - I'd guess some of them had some value as antiques too.)
 
one possibility is humidity: do you happen to have a clock in the bathroom or the kitchen? i was going mad trying to figure out why the batteries died after a couple of weeks, until i noticed the paper face had wrinkled ever so slightly, but enough to cause the hands to bind and make it seem like it had stopped working. taking the clock down to change the batteries caused the hands to move slightly, temporarily freeing them to move over a dried surface, until the humidity increased enough to cause the paper to swell/wrinkle again.

just a thought
 
Had you thought about buying a clock with a digital display?
It sounds to me like you've been buying clocks that have some mechanical element to them. These days, even expensive clock movements are cheaply manufactured.

The alternative is to look for an antique clock in excellent working order. That needn't be as expensive as you might think.

As for myself, I have several clocks in the house - and the only ones that still work are digital.
 
i remember reading once about a medical condition (perhaps phenomenon would be a better word lol) called "sliders" It refers to people who have problems with electrical items, there are stories of people who can turn off every light in a street just by walking down it. I suffer from this condition, i used to have issues with watches when i was a child, and CD players would stop working and when my mum brushed my hair in front of the TV the channels would change over. I believe its to do with a build up of static electricity in certain people causing electrical items to fail. I have also been known to cause lightbulbs to explode if i`m in a bad mood and if i`m particularly stressed at work then the tills and computers would crash around me and i was frequently blamed for powercuts when i worked for woolworths :p

Unfortunately i can`t remember where i read about this condition- it may well have been an old copy of FT!
 
pinkstarbuck said:
i remember reading once about a medical condition (perhaps phenomenon would be a better word lol) called "sliders" It refers to people who have problems with electrical items, there are stories of people who can turn off every light in a street just by walking down it!
Click to expand...
Street Light Interference thread here:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=238
 
I think we have a few clocks that stop once in a while, but my grampa fixes them and they start working as usual. One of my bedroom alarm clocks recently stopped, and I put it away and bought a digital one instead.
 
I have problems with battery Quartz analogue watches. If i get a new one it will generally last until the battery goes flat. If I have the battery replaced or replace it myself it will usually keep going for about another 3 months or so then stop. I will try another new battery, but the watch usually does not go again. This has happened so many times with both cheap & expensive watches that I now have a mechanical automatic that seems ok. Before quartz watches were available I had wind up ones that were ok.
Battery clocks in the home tend to have plastic innards and are far less reliable than you might imagine. Especially the cheaper ones.
Get a good old Smiths Enfield 8 day striker that has been going for about 60 years and will probably go for another 60 with a drop of oil every 2 years or so. Thinking about it, this must be the 'greenest' way of telling the time - no batteries, no new manufacturing :D .
 
jeff544 said:
I have problems with battery Quartz analogue watches. If i get a new one it will generally last until the battery goes flat. If I have the battery replaced or replace it myself it will usually keep going for about another 3 months or so then stop. I will try another new battery, but the watch usually does not go again. This has happened so many times with both cheap & expensive watches...
Click to expand...
I had something similar happen recently. A watch I'd had for a few years began to lose time, so I figured it needed a new battery. I took it to a market stall specialising in this sort of stuff, and the man changed the battery, but it wouldn't restart. He didn't charge me for the battery, but said to take it home, as it might come back to life later. (But it didn't.)

I needed a watch that day, so I bought one of the cheap ones he had (£5), and that's what I use now. But sometimes I get a disconcerting experience when I look at it - it seems to be stopped (second hand not moving), but after what seems like a few seconds it goes again. (A similar thing happened with the old one.) I'm pretty sure this is some kind of eye/brain misperception thing going on, as the watch doesn't actually lose any time, checked against the computer clock.
 
It does sound like a subjective phenomenon.
Perhaps it's a point when your brain revs up and your body clock runs faster than actual time?
 
Ah, memories.

The Streetlight Interference Thread is what brought me to the boards in the first place.

(Slightly OT, coming as I did from a link, I was on the boards for years before I realized that there were more sections than IHTM.)

I have, however, never had a problem with watches or clocks. Well, not an unexplainable problem. I tend to beat the hell out of my alarm clock in the morning until it shuts off. Consequently, those have to be replaced rather regularly....
 
I have a problem with watches. It's a running joke in my family that buying me a watch is a waste of money. They just stop working. No reason at all, I've taken them to watch repairers and they haven't been able to find a reason for it.
 
I have a friend who used to have a problem with this - she claims that in her youth she consistently caused clocks, watches, calculators, computers etc to malfunction when she touched them. The problem stopped at some point.

Interestingly (to me), she had a very dysfunctional family as a child, has a very eccentric personality and eccentric beliefs, and seems to attract trouble to herself in the form of problematic people and weird situations. I've always wondered whether psychological and electrical issues were related somehow.
 
My mum had trouble with wrist watches stopping and starting and she was told that she was "full of electric energy" by one of her "psychic" pals! she changed froma silver watch to a gold one and it has kept good time ever since!

Also, when a family friend died, so did his watch. It stopped the moment he died. He was a watch mender for 40 years 8)
 
My mother could never wear watches, they always stopped or broke somehow.
She told me when she lived in the USA as a teenager in the late 50s/early60s her friends got into Scientology and tried to get her to join, she said to join you had to have some sort of energy assessment by holding electrodes on a machine with dials? not sure how to describe it, and she failed the test so badly they said they had never had such a bad reading, and wouldn't let her join!
 
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