Office Clock

Click after agonizing click, time ticks away so slowly that you can literally watch the skin cells on your arm be born, die and turn into dust. Work is not always like this, however on slow days you can only try and keep hold of your sanity by listening to the radio or doing jumping jacks. Unfortunately the local station is having technical issues and your left foot has been sore ever since you tried to kick the television back into life. No, no hope for you this day, only the ticking of the clock to keep you company and caress your quickly maddening mind. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to consistently measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units: the day; the lunar month; and the year. Devices operating on several different physical processes have been used over the millennia, culminating in the clocks of today. The sundial, which measures the time of day by using the sun casting a shadow onto a cylindrical stone, was widely used in ancient times. A well-constructed sundial can measure local solar time with reasonable accuracy, and sundials continued to be used to monitor the performance of clocks until the modern era. However, its practical limitations—it requires the sun to shine and does not work at all during the night—encouraged the use of other techniques for measuring time. Candle clocks and sticks of incense that burn down at approximately predictable speeds have also been used to estimate the passing of time. In an hourglass, fine sand pours through a tiny hole at a constant rate and indicates a predetermined passage of an arbitrary period of time.