Memo to Google/Nest: Synch the Clocks

So Google has bought Nest, the maker of smart home thermostats and smoke detectors.  It doesn’t plan to stop there but to make all the mundane technologies in the home smarter and more pleasing.  OK, folks, here’s your next project:  synch the f**king clocks.

In our home we have a digital clock in the microwave, another in the kitchen radio, another in the stove, one in the refrigerator, and another one on the wall, among others.  And they all tell a different time.  They’re off just a minute or two or three, but as time goes by they drift further apart.  It’s laughable that devices with such a show of precision don’t have a clue what time it really is, and are totally unaware of each other.  And at the twice-yearly change from or to Daylight Savings, it’s a royal pain to reset them all over the house and in the car.  Timepieces that don’t synch and don’t self-correct are as antiquated as cuckoo clocks.

The fix would seem to be laughably easy.  The technology is well established. For example, Casio sells a line of inexpensive wrist watches that contain a radio chip that reads the national atomic-clock accurate time signal from a shortwave transmitter at Ft. Collins CO in the wee hours of each night and sets itself to the second. (I have one and it works. See ad below.) Alternatively, clocks could get their signal from home wifi.

So, how about it, Google/Nest?  Build a radio-enabled or network-capable digital clock module, cheap, and shame all the appliance manufacturers to license it.  The new smart time-synch capability (with appropriate logo) will be a selling point much like the Energy Star label.  People with unsynched appliances will be too embarrassed to invite guests over.  And all the folks with borderline cases of OCD, like me, will breathe big sighs of relief to live in a space where all the clocks tell the same time and the right time, all the time.