This year’s switch to Daylight Saving Time was part of a two week period when more than an early morning sunrise time changed. On a Sunday when many church goers found themselves having to drag themselves out of bed earlier than they may have liked, many now realize that even going to church is luxury that may not be available in the next few weeks, possibly months. From the WiFi digital wall clocks that will no longer be watched by school students who are now learning at home to the synchronized clock systems in factories that are now temporarily shut down, we are a nation of people who will be looking at time differently for this next few months.

Whether you are a parent who is now both working from home and supervising your children with their online school work or you are one of the 10 or fewer workers in a restaurant kitchen where meals are now only served through a takeout window or a delivery service, there will likely be times when it will seem as if time is standing still.

Clock Servers Keep Businesses on the Same Page When it Comes to Working from home

As the San Francisco Bay Area sends a message to community members to shelter in place, it should come as no surprise that clock servers will now be the link that keeps people informed about when online meetings will occur. In fact, time clock servers may become even more necessary when working parents find themselves not just sitting in their office before an important meeting, but possible helping their children with Algebra, Physics, or Romeo and Juliet. As the nation waits to see the complete impact that the Coronavirus will have on their day to lives, there are also many who will be watching the synchronized clocks on their laptops as the buying and selling frenzy occurs on Wall Street.

Time has always mattered, but when Americans find themselves secluded at home in an effort to be more safe there are many who will realize that time is the only constant. It can still regular bedtimes of children who no longer have to get up to physically go to school. It can still regulate the hours when elderly folks are able to shop in a grocery store that is less frantic than it will be later in the day.

Finding a common denominator like time is one of the only ways, perhaps, to keep children on a schedule that they were accustomed to in their classrooms, and one of the only ways to monitor the long hours and days while you wait to see if you are going to show any symptoms after an exposure to this latest disease.

Consider some of these facts and figures about the many ways that time determines the lives that we live:

• from an economic standpoint alone, the U.S. loses an estimated $7.4 billion a day, an amount that represents 50 million hours, due to improperly filled out timesheets.
• The term “stratum” refers to the closeness to a high quality time server. The stratum, for example, indicates the place of a particular time server in a hierarchy of servers. The scale goes from one to 15, with one being the most accurate.
• The smallest unit of time is known as ‘Planck time,’ which is the time it takes for light to travel Planck’s length, which is about 3.3 times 10 to the -44 power of a second.
• Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is used to synchronize clocks throughout a computer network. It was originally defined and standardized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the year 2002.
• All 31 working satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS) have built-in, highly accurate atomic clocks.
• Humans have been keeping time for 5,000 to 6,000 years. The ancient Egyptians, in fact, were the first to tell time by using obelisks as primitive sundials. The first mechanical clocks, however, were not invented until the 14th century in Europe.

One of the funniest memes on social media this week has been parents saying that they have now homeschooled their children for 30 minutes and now think that teachers deserve a much higher rate of pay. Clock servers matter in every setting today.