It was supposed to be a very simple morning. I was supposed to get up, get ready, and take off for Andorra on a bus. Sounds simple, doesn’t it. But, there was a small problem. When I went to the bus station I had my big pack with me. I didn’t really need my big pack when I was in Andorra so the plan was to put the big pack in a locker at the Barcelona bus station and pick it up when I got back. Sounds easy. So, I put my big pack in the locker and put my money in. Nothing happened. I started to panic. There were people around me who tried to help me but could not speak English and I could not speak enough Spanish to communicate with them quickly. I say quickly because even though I got to the bus station at 10:05 AM, the bus for Andorra left at 10:30 AM. By this time it was more like 10:10 AM. The people tried to help me, but failed. I’m starting to panic a little more. The clock is ticking and I do not want to take my pack to Andorra, not to mention the $5 that I fed the locker that it wasn’t giving back to me. I decided to go inside to the information booth and ask for help. The lady at the information booth didn’t seem to believe that the locker failed to work. I kept trying to convince her that it did.

Finally, she decides to get a security person to look at the locker. It seems that he has a set of keys. I figure it’s because the lockers fail so often. He goes over and opens the locker and takes the electronic mechanism out of the locker. He starts shaking it and lo-and-behold, not only does my money fall out, but a little extra falls out as well. He then tries to make the locker work. No luck. It’s broken. He then moves one locker down. He makes this one work. My day is saved. I thank him profusely. He has saved me a lot of extra grief.

I then look at my ticket to find the departure location where my bus would leave. It was not on the ticket. I panic some more and look at my watch. It’s 10:17 AM. The bus leaves at 10:30 AM. I’m starting to worry more. Yes, I can get a new ticket, but that involves going to the bus office, hassling to change the ticket, and then waiting in the bus station for another hour or two. I walk inside and check the departure board. It has no listings for anything past 09:30 AM. I wonder why but assume the board is broken. I then check with the information lady again. She tells me the bus leaves from location 32. Great. I make it space 32 with 10 minutes to spare. Whew!

But, I sense there’s something wrong. Usually, when I get to a bus that is about to depart there is a driver and a sign in the window that tells where the bus is going. There was no driver around. This bus had a sign, but not for Andorra. It had a sign for somewhere I had never heard of. I wondered. I tuned to the lone person sitting nearby and asked if this was the bus to Andorra. She said yes. I was still uncertain. I started looking for someone that could verify her statements. That’s when I saw the clock above me. It said that it was 09:08 AM. I wondered why they did not fix their clocks. Then it dawned on me. Maybe that really was the correct time. Maybe that’s the reason why the derparture board had no listings past 09:30 AM. I go inside to start checking clocks to see what time it was.

To make a longer story shorter, it really was a little after 09:00 AM. It turned out that my watch has somehow been moved from the Time setting to the Time-2 setting which allows me to have a time setting for local time and a time setting for the time at another location. I never use Time-2 and it seems that it’s always been set to be about one hour and fifteen minutes ahead of whatever my local time is set for. Since I never change local time on my watch I just never really noticed. When it got all strange on me. You know, I try to be a very organized person. But, sometimes, life’s a challenge.