12:34. I am sitting in front of my kitchen stove as I write this. It’s dark. I have turned off all the lights and even if it wasn’t the middle of the night, I have draped heavy bed sheets over all my windows. I know they are watching me. They are waiting for me to fall asleep so that they can change it. I’m on to them, though.
12:35. God, how I want to fall asleep now. I’m usually in bed by now. But my coffee is motivating me. I carefully inspected each bean before brewing, just to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with.
12:36. Today started like all the others. My phone alarm went off at 07:15 AM. Right on the minute. A small symbol of a battery at the top right told me my phone didn’t fully charge. I didn’t think much of it, must have been plugged in weird. I felt a bit more tired than usual. Weird as well. I had gone to bed early, I thought. Oh well, sometimes sleep makes you more tired.
12:37. But the day had started normal. I took a shower, boiled some eggs. The stove’s pale green clock said “06:45”. I have lived in this apartment by myself for several years now. The first few times the time changed, I had to call the maintenance man to come and fix the clock because I was unfamiliar with the stove model. The embarrassment of having to ask him to do such a simple task quickly made me learn to do it myself. This morning I switched it without even thinking.
12:38. Besides that it was the same routine I had done a thousand mornings. I have a boring office job. A drab, grey building that’s a half an hour commute away. I listened to the morning radio. It mentioned today would have been the day to set our clocks back an hour, if Congress hadn’t declared an end to Daylight Savings Time last year. That’s right, I thought, I wonder why my stove didn’t get the memo?
12:39. By the time I pulled into the parking lot–I remember checking my phone, a sharp 08:34 AM–I was feeling a bit suspicious. Why had my stove been off? My phone of course was updated immediately, Apple is in bed with the Federal Government after all. But my stove was wrong. Just like it had been when we still had Daylight Savings Time.
12:40. As I walked up the stairs I thought about it more. What had been the issue with changing the clock anyways? It was never an issue growing up. It was a tradition. But now this liberal congress wanted to change it? I remember seeing the testimonies from so-called ‘scientists’. They had all kinds of phony-baloney studies saying that the time change caused car-crashes and commercial unproductivity. I had never had any issues with it. It was a little annoying sure, but definitely not that big of a deal.
12:41. More work to change it really. But, had they really changed it? I mean the radio said they did, but we all know about the mainstream media and their agenda. If they had changed it, why was my stove still saying the correct time? I thought about all this as I walked into work. I sat down at my desk, and tried to let it go. But I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
12:42. I checked a few emails, most didn’t even require a reply but I hated the little notification in my inbox. After that, I didn’t have much to do until the mid-day reports came in. I usually pretended to be busy by playing solitaire, but today I spent my morning googling the history of Daylight Savings Time. I learned that, at least according to official histories, Benjamin Franklin had come up with the idea of setting our clocks back. He was a Founding Father, so clearly he knew something. But who knows if he actually did invent it? I mean they also say the founding fathers were slave-owners and atheists.
12:43. The more I looked into it, the more I became convinced that the government had some malintent with the clocks. Turns out time zones were invented by train company barrons. That makes sense, the government caving in to the elites. Also, apparently the government lets Indians choose their own time zone, just more affirmative action crap.
12:44. I decided to take an early lunch. I had to clear my head a little bit. I clocked out at exactly 01:02 PM. I had thirty minutes to scarf down the stale chips and flat coke I bought from the vending machine. Most of the other people in the break room I was only vaguely familiar with, so I sat alone. Not that I usually sit with people anyways.
12:45. From the table next to me, I heard one of my coworkers, some random woman from accounting, I think Margie is her name, talking about how great it was to not have to change the clocks back again. I couldn’t help but speak up, “I had to change my stove clock.”
The group looked over at me, so I continued, “Yep. I dunno, I guess my time is still changing. I’ve been looking into how the government controls the time. If you ask me, they’re still changing the time and just expecting all of us to go along with it.”
Margie raised an eyebrow, “Well my stove was the correct time this morning. What do you think the CIA came in and changed all the stoves in America except for yours?” She said it in a condescending tone, like she was talking to a child. I had heard that same tone many times when I talked to my coworkers about politics.
12:46. I felt the anger rise inside me a bit, ”I mean, is it that hard to believe? The CIA does all kinds of crazy shit. MK Ultra, assassinations, you know. Not just JFK either, they do it around the world.”
One of my other co-workers, a jockey asshole named Ted spoke up, “I mean sure the CIA is into some crazy stuff. But let’s be reasonable here. Look, do you have a clock in your car? That should be the wrong time too, right?”
12:47. A group of six or so of us, including myself, Ted, and Margie, decided to go check. A couple of them were laughing quietly with each other as we rode down the elevator. I ignored them. They would see that I was right.
12:48. We walked up to my car. It was relatively nice, not the best in the lot, but I had to work to get my credit rating high enough to afford it. I opened the door with an urgent tug and looked at the clock in the middle of the dashboard. 01:23. It was in line with the rest of the world. I turned back to the small gathering.
“Well?” one of them asked.
“It’s a bit past one,” I replied.
“See,” Ted said, “that proves it! Maybe something happened to your stove. But there’s no reason to think they,” he laughed as he said the word, “singled you out.”
“This doesn’t disprove anything. In fact, it’s more evidence,” I said, “Clearly they have tapped the break room. They must have come and changed my clock while we were walking down.”12:49. A few of them laughed, but stopped when they realized I wasn’t joking. Thenthey laughed again, this time at me. Ted started to say something, but Margie cut him off. She said that they should go back up to the break room and finish eating, after all, it was almost 1:30 and they would have to clock back in soon.
12:50. I was left alone in the parking lot. I started to look around for evidence of an intrusion. Of course, they probably had very sophisticated ways of breaking into cars. There was no sign of forced entry. No tire marks. There was a white van with big blue letters, “Hudson Electric Co.”, on the far side of the parking lot though. Maybe they had somehow picked up that I was on to them. I was pretty popular on the conspiracy websites, maybe they had been tracking me since before they stole the time.
12:51. As I looked around for more evidence, I spotted it. I tried to act like I didn’t even notice, wary of that white van. One of those CCTV cameras. It was at a weird angle, maybe it couldn’t even see my car. I had to check, though. I nearly ran back into the building and rushed up the stairs. Mark in security would be able to access the video. I jogged past the small device on the wall that was there to clock in and out from. 01:35. I would be late clocking back in but hell, it wasn’t the right time anyways. I got to security and burst through the door.
12:52. Mark looked up from a half-eaten piece of tofu, “What’s up buddy?”
“Listen. Can you check the cameras in the parking lot?”“Sure, why?”
“I… I think someone may have broken into my car.” Mark was sympathetic to a lot of my talking points, but I doubted even he would believe me on this.
“Ah, well if someone has then we can file a police report. There have been some car break-ends lately.”
“Yea, sure,” I said more frantically than I wanted to, “just check for me.”
12:53. He began to load up the screen, pointing it away from me. I asked if I could watch too, but he said that it was against policy. A confused look came across his face, then he said, “Oh shit. Yea, some of the power went out.”“What?” I nearly screamed.
“Yep. I was in the emails this morning. Part of the building has a scheduled power outage today for maintenance.“
12:54. I tried to play it cool, like this wasn’t the best evidence I had for the conspiracy yet. After some brief chit-chat I walked back to my desk. Of course it was my part of the building with the outage. Had one of my emails mentioned the maintenance? I didn’t think so. But I couldn’t be sure for another twenty minutes until the electricity came back on.
12:55. I checked my read messages, sure enough there was an email from the office manager mentioning the outage. But, couldn’t they have just hacked the email server and put that in there after they realized their mistake? Maybe Mark was in on it. Maybe there wasn’t an actual outage until there had needed to be.
12:56. I went up to the office manager and questioned her on the email. When did she send it? Who told her to send it? She gave all the answers she was supposed to. I almost gave away that I knew she was lying, I couldn’t help but quietly say “you’re all in on it” under my breath. She asked me what I said and I played it off.
12:57. After that I went and told my supervisor that I would need the rest of the day off. That I wasn’t feeling well. The whole ride home I tried to look behind me, to see if I was being tailed. Of course they knew where I lived. It was probably on one of those lists. I finally got home and unpacked my backpack.
12:58. I unplugged every device in my home, besides the stove which I moved back an hour to the correct time. Of course, I am not dumb enough to keep one of those smart speakers around, but who knows? Maybe they have our coffee makers listening to us. After a few hours the warming meat in the fridge began to stink, but I didn’t dare go outside to throw it out. Thankfully I have enough rations to last me a few days. I also checked for hidden cameras and covered my windows with bed sheets.
12:59. That’s when I noticed that same white van. Henderson Electric. They were following me after all. They were waiting just outside until I fell asleep so they can come in and change the time again. They want to steal it from me.
01:00. I am getting so sleepy. This first night is going to be the hardest. I am going to stay up for as long as I can, though. Maybe I can make it a couple days. I am going to sit here and watch this stove clock to make sure they don’t change it again. Even if I am the only one in the country, someone has to make sure the government doesn’t change the time again.
12:01.