Gimme a Smile: Time travel, 10 minutes at a time

Published 10:30 pm Friday, August 29, 2025

I traveled forward in time last week. We all did.

I woke up Monday morning to the weird sight of my oven clock running 10 minutes fast. The microwave showed the same accelerated time. I checked my phone — it was 10 minutes slower than the other two. What was going on? Which was correct?

I couldn’t imagine someone sneaking into my house and bumping up my appliance clocks by 10 minutes. Who would do that? Could it have been my sister, who has been known to tell me that church started at 10:45 so I would be on time for the actual 11 a.m. start time? (To be fair, this was in retaliation for that one time when I might have done the same thing to her, but who’s keeping score?)

No, my sister was in Michigan on Monday, and unless a wormhole accompanied the mysterious time warp, she could not have been the culprit. Was my husband setting the clocks ahead to match the car clock which runs fast? No, he was as mystified as I was.

Maybe it was my phone that was wrong. That would make more sense. Some malicious hacker or hilarious prankster could have hacked into the system and set all phone clocks 10 minutes behind, causing civilization as we know it to come to a grinding halt while everyone grappled with the existential questions of “what time is it?” and “am I late or not?”

Luckily, I could say for sure which clocks were wrong on Monday morning. I have a battery-operated wall clock with hands that go around in a clockwise direction. Hooray for analog! I determined that my oven and microwave clocks were at fault. They were trying to steal 10 minutes of my life away.

Come to find out, our house was not the only one caught up in this space/time disturbance. The entire city of Juneau had experienced a time acceleration through their home appliances. We all traveled forward in time, entering the future 10 minutes too soon.

Ultimately, the electric company took responsibility, blaming the freaky occurrence on something about the failure of their device that regulates high and low frequencies of their system. Yeah, right. They might as well have said that their system had developed a mind of its own and decided to plunge the entire town into temporal chaos, just for one day. Presumably this was a one-off, and we won’t experience time travel again anytime soon.

But here’s the thing. It happened again this weekend. It wasn’t the clocks this time, but I definitely traveled forward in time on Saturday. It happened at the store…

I went to the store for some gardening gloves, a good summertime purchase for the middle of August. I came around the corner and nearly collided with a colossal skeleton head and torso rising up out of the floor. I’m not talking about a life-sized skeleton here — this was a literal giant big enough to smash pumpkins between its massive, bony hands.

After picking up the gardening gloves I had dropped in my fright, I gazed around to see Halloween decorations everywhere. I was too startled to look closely enough to find the Christmas decorations, but I’m sure they were out there somewhere. I thought it was the middle of August, but clearly, I had traveled forward in time a couple of months, landing in the middle of October. I don’t think the electric company was the culprit this time.

I wish I could control this ability to time travel. I could go forward in time whenever I wanted, skipping those moments that I didn’t feel the need to experience. I could jump from the end of dinner straight to the evening activities, breezing past the chore of doing the dishes. I could zip from checking in to checking out at the doctor’s office, skipping the discomfort of sitting in that over-air-conditioned exam room wearing nothing but a flimsy paper gown. Best of all, I could take a miss on hours of hold music while waiting to conduct my business over the phone.

How can I tap into these time travel possibilities? I should have a quick word with the electric company.

Peggy McKee Barnhill is a wife, mother, and author who writes cozy mysteries under the pen name “Greta McKennan.” She likes to look at the bright side of life.