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For over a week, the digital clocks in Catania have been perplexing owners by skipping ahead 15 to 20 minutes every day.
The inexplicable time changes caught the attention of two computer technicians in Sicily, who turned to Facebook to confirm the phenomenon.
Posing a question to ask if their friends and colleagues had noticed anything amiss with their clocks and radios established a definite pattern of electronic misbehavior.
Experts in the University of Catania's electronic engineering department have been unable to give a singular answer to explain the irregularity. The digital misfires could have to do with the network of power generators based in Sicily, or even with an underwater electric cable that is currently under construction.
Sicilian digital clock owners will have to go back to old-fashioned timepieces, or they are destined to be 20 minutes early for all their appointments until the electrical variations can be accounted for.
Comment: Our SOTT representative in Italy reports that according to Italian local newspapers, the mystery of "misbehaving clocks" has been "solved". As it turns out, Italian authorities where setting up a new undersea power cable, and consequently, the Hz frequency changed from 49-50 to 50-50.13, moving forward all the electric clocks after being hit by EM signal that supposedly affected the whole island.
Mystery solved, or is it? There is one "slight" problem with the proposed explanation. According to our Italian representative, during the same period of time, battery driven clock at his work also moved backward 15-20 minutes. So something else appears to be at work here. Care to speculate?
in Saudi Arabia also. A few weeks back several of us noticed the clock on our cell phones were about 25 minutes backward (all of us had automatic time update engaged).
By next day it was OK.