The End of " Time " !

For sixty six years there has been a trustworthy institution available for those who want to determine the exact time at that moment.  All they had to do was pick up their telephone and dial 1194 and a crisply spoken male voice would enunciate that information with great accuracy.  In fact it would continuously announce the exact time by the hour, the minuter and countdown the seconds with the words " at the third stroke " , followed by those inimitable " time pips ".  That service was available for the cost of a local phone call.

At the stroke of midnight this October 30 that sonorous voice will fall silent.  Telstra provides that service and it has decided it is no longer relevant in this digital age.  It will probably be sorely missed by the amazing number of young people who - when faced with an analogue watch - are incapable of deciphering the time.  A quick call to 1194 puts them out of their misery.

That spoken time clock was also famous for exacting revenge on an unfaithful lover when the digital age arrived.   If the young lady still had a key to her lovers flat it was common for her to dial long distance to the time clock message in London and then leave the phone off the hook.   Of course, that was a time when overseas calls were outrageously expensive.

It also harks back to the age of the digital watch.  The first of these arrived in the early 1960's and the " Bulova" brand had an asking price of about two thousand dollars.  It promised accuracy of plus or minus two seconds in a whole year and thus setting them on the right time was important.  When mass production caused the price to fall to within reach of ordinary people the quarts watch on most wrists delivered an accuracy feature that was impossible for the old mechanical movement watches to achieve.

In todays digital age that 1194 service still attracts about two million calls a year and call numbers this year were greater than last year.   In particular, the service reaches a crescendo at both the start and finish of daylight saving.  It seems that the Telstra spoken clock is trusted to deliver the required accuracy more reliably than the other alternatives.

Perhaps this discontinuation is a sign of the changing times.  It is a rare person who does not have a mobile phone in their hand or in their pocket these days, and these deliver the time in digital form. Accurate time information appears when we boot up our computers, but in all such instances there is no countdown in seconds between the advancement of minutes and that is not helpful if you need the time with precision.

It would not be a big ask to request the technology providers of computers and mobile phones to add that second countdown to the progress of minutes to serve the fanatics who still rely on Telstra's talking clock.