[LEAPSECS] Forgetting summer time

[Rob Seaman]

On Apr 2, 2014, at 2:35 PM, David Malone <dwmalone at maths.tcd.ie> wrote:


> I've only seen this reported in the UK news, and not Ireland

> apocryphal, but it's a good story:

> 

> 	http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/10739277/Device-exploded-in-bombers-face-after-he-forgot-about-clocks-changing.html


More than a little suspicious of the April 1 date...

...but going along as a hypothetical, do we understand what the police's theory would be?  It sounds like they are saying the bomb went off at the time specified, but the bomber had failed to leave the area because his watch remained set an hour behind the new local time?

This assumes that the bomb was triggered by a timekeeping device.  Fair enough I suppose (having remarkably little expertise in this area).  Such a device is either a countdown timer or an alarm clock.  (At least in the movies.)  If the former it isn't obvious why the change to summer time would matter as long as the bomber was self consistent.  If the latter I guess the thought is that the alarm clock was itself of the kind that automatically resets to summer time?  (In the U.S. these are annoyingly called "atomic clocks".  What do they call them in the UK?)  In any event, there is nothing in the report or the various echoes on the web to suggest any evidence of this.

So if not a joke (in poor taste) escaped into the wild, perhaps this is just a naive assumption due to happening on the date of such a transition?  Are there other examples of such stories?  Aside from millions of variations of getting to work an hour late?

Rob