Freewheeling Blog: My Truly Cuckoo Clock

Little, quirky things can make our lives more fun. I have a few such objects in my house.

First, I have assigned a plastic green kazoo the job of propping open a bathroom door that drifts because of a slight shift in our house's foundation. Then there's the travel alarm clock I keep in my office. The clock also shows the temperature, and I like to know the temperature because the room gets hot or cold by season. A friend thinks I'm quirky because I take this travel clock on trips so I always know the temperature in the hotel room.

We have a new item to add to the eccentricity: a cuckoo clock from the Black Forest in Germany.

Sara and I purchased this rather modest clock (they're so expensive!) during a trip two years ago. But it wouldn't keep time. Oh, the little girl would swing with determined passion, and the cuckoo would tweet IF I moved the clock hands manually. But the clock wouldn't keep time on its own. Not a very useful clock.

I took the clock to a couple of repair shops. The specialists would look it over and pronounce it unfixable. Finally, a guy in the back at the second shop said, "I've never worked on a clock before, but I'll bet I could fix it!"

Why not let him try? He fiddled with it for a couple of weeks; to my surprise, he did get the clock working again!

Or so I thought. The clock keeps time, and the cuckoo sings, but the number of cuckoo calls was wrong. The cuckoo seemed to chirp randomly; whatever the time was, the cuckoo definitely would not call out that number.

For a couple of weeks, I would listen and try to discern the pattern. Then it struck me: the cuckoo was calling out the current time in Germany, seven hours off!

In the picture, the clock has just passed 3:00 p.m. But the cuckoo sang ten times, because it was 10:00 p.m. in Germany. And so it goes, day and night, the little cuckoo determinedly letting us know German time.

This raises all sorts of questions in our household. Is this pure coincidence, or does the clock actually know what time it is in Germany? What will happen when we leave Daylight Savings Time? Do we ever want to fix it?

The last is easy to answer: No! Sara and I love the fact that the clock is off kilter to exactly match the time in Germany. We don't want it to change.

The clock developed another issue after its repair. The girl doesn't swing anymore. She tries, but merely wobbles a little. If we take it back to the local shop under the warranty, we'll have to tell the guy, "Fix the girl, but do NOT change the number of times the cuckoo sounds!"