It takes serious effort to find a time keeping device worse than the Windows Explorer "time remaining" predictions. But, well, I succeeded.
Our not-fancy but waterproof electronic bathroom clock, you know, the device with the singular task of telling the correct time, gets delayed by 5 minutes every couple of months. Right, ok.
The electronic living room clock is supposed to radio-wave sync to some central time-keeper somewhere and always stay accurate. Except that I have to manually set it a few days after every battery change after waiting for it to try and fail to accomplish this task.
There are also timer functions on some of the kitchen appliances.
The cooking ovens that most of the developed world is used to having under their cooking surfaces (be it gas-, electric or wood-fuelled for all I care) don't really exist in most of Japan. No idea why. What are quite common, though, are smaller "fish-grills" (essentially sideways toasters) and microwave ovens with the additional "real oven" functionality. And best of luck to you, if you mix up the programs and put a metal cooking tray in the microwaves or try to quickly warm up a plastic bento tray of rice but click on the "grill" button by accident. Anyway, ours seems to be timing things relatively normally, or at least closely enough that I've never been triggered to properly re-time the thing.
Likewise, I haven't checked the food drying cupboard timer, because it really doesn't matter when the ON periods are several hours at the least in any case. However, judging by the many-tens-of-degrees-wrong thermometer of the same machine, I wouldn't place bets on the timer making sense either.
Next is the rice cooker, that, when first turned on, happily claims to need 33 minutes to cook whatever amount of rice and water on whatever program one selects. After it has had a while to ponder, it is anyone's guess where the number displayed on the screen comes from or what it means. I've seen the count go up as well as down (despite the contents of the pot being identical when starting); I've seen quite logical down-by-one-minute-at-a-time counting; I've seen the thing stop at 9 or 13 minutes for 5 minutes at a time; I've seen it drop instantly from 22 down to 15 or to 3; I've seen it get stuck at 1 minute for 10 minutes etc. Regardless, the longest it takes to get the food is a bit over half an hour + it does keep the rice warm after it's finished, so whatever the electronic synapses think they are doing doesn't really interfere with life much.
And then there is the washing machine.
It technically has an overnight timer function - load the laundry and detergent, set the program and wake up in time to hang everything out to dry to catch the longest rain-free period possible. Except that the bloody thing manages to miss the target time by hours. On either side, unpredictably. So much of plannability. Oh, and the timer isn't based on the actual time of the day (let's call this the absolute time), it is subjective, so the whole thing depends on first knowing the time you happen to be setting it up, then calculating hours until the morning, then adding a couple as buffer and then still having to either wake up at a wrong time, wait for an x amount of time for it to finish, or suffer from the too-long-wet-in-the-machine-now-smelly-and-wrinkled clothes. On top of that the "running timer" behaves in all the ways the one in the rice cooker does - jumping back and forth, getting stuck on random numbers etc. An especially peculiar situation tends to occur when setting the machine for a 10 minute blow-dry function, only to be presented with the error of "load too heavy to blow-dry", followed by the machine blow-drying while still blinking the error, for exactly 10 minutes before unlocking the door. Wait... eh??
And don't get me started on the temperature regulation of the thing. Because one can not simply set the washing water temperature to the desired number. Noooo, one can activate the function to add +0 up to +40 degrees of warming to whatever temperature water happens to come out of the pipes. The pipes that, like the rest of the house, has no insulation. In a climate that in the winter is at 0C and in the summer is at 40C. Who the f thinks this is a good design decision... Well, at least we have a washing machine that does, in fact, warm the water a bit. Because like some Japanese person proudly told me a while ago, washing clothes in cold water is good, because their laundry detergents are also good. Followed by wearing a shirt three times and then throwing it into trash, because it stinks to high heavens due to the biohazard that has, obviously, not been washed out with this magical cold water of theirs. The number of people in public places that stink like wet dishrags, is also absurdly high, I might add. By the way, did I mention that wearing perfume is considered rude here?
All in all, if the relatively simple electronic devices cannot manage an accurate timer, I shudder to guess what havoc all the smart-home and AI appliances can/will cause.
Random side-note, time is also behaving strangely with regards to books... read total of February at the moment with a week still to go is 23, with 2 half-read and at least 2 more to be added before the end of the month due to them being sequels. So at least 27 then. But that is how many days there are in the entire month. Am I imagining things or? Not a clue how I managed all that. Well, maybe a bit of a clue - got the notion of putting on random audiobooks as background to exercise or housework, but even disregarding those 9, the count seems a touch absurd.
Cheers,
Hedi
