Tales from the Crapped: Out of Time!

Today's crap: An innocent little sand timer.

I've had this item for a very long time, actually. I can remember quite clearly where I got it, though the actual year is fuzzy. It was many years ago, I believe I was in junior high, possibly younger. A neighbor was having a garage sale, and I purchased the "Scrabble Sentence Cube Game."

Yes, even back then I was very much into both garage sales/thrifting and board games. Some things never change, huh?

The game was a strange combination of Scrabble and Yahtzee, except instead of words you tried to create sentences. There were about 15 wooden dice that had various words on them. After rolling the dice, you would flip the timer (see it there in the picture?) and you had that much time to construct a sentence. The game was rather poor, actually, but I enjoyed playing with it nonetheless. I remember being very frustrated by the timer, but the whole game only cost me a quarter.

Years later I was trying to clear out my vast accumulation of stuff and I came across it again. The game itself was pretty worthless (in every way), so I tossed it. But I kept the sand timer. You see, what I didn't quite get when I was 10 was blatantly obvious when I was much older: the timer was broken.

Sand timers have always been fascinating to me. What an ancient form of timekeeping! Quite a simple design, too. The classic hourglass, obviously, measured about an hour. These days, most of them only run for one to three minutes. They probably seem quaint to most people, what with digital stopwatches accurate to 1/100th of a second.

But as I said, my sand timer is broken. The narrow opening between the two bulbs is far too large. Although it looks like it should run for about a minute, the sand flies through the glass completely in four seconds. Four seconds! I timed it! No wonder I found the game too hard.

This timer has been a cornerstone on many of my desks at different jobs. Whenever people came in to talk to me about issues, I would calmly and thoughtfully say, "You have this much time to explain your problem to me." Rarely did they get more than a couple of words out. Excellent! If only I could actually enforce that rule!

This calls up an interesting question, though. Is the sand timer actually broken? I mean, it still measures time, just not the amount it's supposed to. If you ever had an activity that required you to do something every four seconds, this would prove invaluable. It would certainly speed up other games I have that use timers. Hmm. Maybe this piece of crap is more useful than I thought?