According to Whitman clocks, it sometimes takes people five minutes to walk up a single flight of stairs. Due to the  unreliablity of the clocks, they are being transferred to a more consistent satellite system.

The dependability of the clocks affects the timing of the way people go about their day. In October, the Olin clocks got completely off time due to a wire that connects to the central Olin clock being disrupted by the Sherwood construction.

“While a professor is used to seeing a few tumbleweeds roll throughclasses right before break, I had never experienced anything quite this severe.  At 2:30 (actual time), not a single person from a 20 person class had showed up.  Three students straggled in over the next 5 minutes, each looking at the clock and figuring they had
more time before class started, when I had to explain that no, in fact, the start time for class had passed.  In all, eight students attended that lecture (in fairness, many of those that were missing had attended an earlier session of the same class). Attendance is usually perfect on those late Friday afternoons….must have something to do with the weekly quiz,” Balof said.

In order to help with these mix-ups the maintenance workers for the academic buildings are working on taking the clocks off the ground work system, and putting them onto the satellite system.

While newer buildings are being originally set up to run by the satellite system, older buildings are run by the ground system, which operates in accordance with a radio wave that travels along the surface of the earth.   On the other hand, satellite clocks use satellites in space in order to receive signals.

“We’re trying to get it narrowed down to one type of clock,” said maintenance worker Ken Kern, “But it’s an expensive process so we’re doing them in stages.”

At this point all of Maxey and half of Olin has been switched to satellite, but the complete switch takes time because the maintenance crew is replacing clocks as they go out, instead of all at once.