Time for my old man Life Hack

I have an old man Life Hack to share: This weekend, I figured out an easy way to re-set the clock on my oven without knowing how to reset the clock.

Whenever the power is off for any reason, as it was last week during the air conditioning installation, the oven clock starts flashing when power is restored, and it stops flashing when I turn the oven on. That much I knew all along, but I had no idea how to set the clock.

The builder left all the manuals in a kitchen drawer, but I moved it and the others “somewhere safe, so I can find it again”, and then promptly forgot where that was. I later made up a notebook in which I write down where I put a thing, and since I did that I haven’t lost anything.

The main problem is that the oven is actually a wall oven, not one designed to be mounted under the kitchen benchtop, as the builder did, directly under the hob (cooktop), as is common. The only way for me to see the temperature I’m setting, or to see several of the controls, is to sit on the floor—and that’s never a great idea the farther one gets from 50. Doing that just to set the clock I don’t even need was never going to happen.

So: I had an oven that hasn’t been displaying the correct time pretty much since I moved in. Until this weekend.

I knew that when power comes back on, it resets to Noon (it’s a 24-hour clock). Mid-afternoon on Friday, I suddenly realised (because I never cared about that clock…) that if I simply turned off the power to the oven at Noon, then turned the power back on, the clock would show the correct time.

Unfortunately, I didn’t remember that at Noon on Saturday, but did at 12:30, anyway, to make sure I was right, and, of course, I was. So at precisely noon on Sunday (relying on my watch, which gets its time from a time server), I switched off the power to the oven at noon, then a couple seconds later I turned it back on. Next, I turned the oven on, then back off, and the oven was FINALLY set to the correct time.

Yes, I could’ve launched yet another search party to find that “somewhere safe” where the manual is, as I’ve done a few times, or (more likely) I could’ve looked it up online, but that wouldn’t help me get back up off the floor after swearing at the difficulty in changing a damn clock I don’t actually use, anyway.

Maybe someday I’ll redo the kitchen, though I’m more likely to move somewhere with a wall oven that’s actually on the wall, and, until/unless that happens, I’m even more likely to continue silently cursing the stupidity of putting a wall oven under a kitchen bench (and also that so many functions are indicated by cryptic pictographs, but that’s a different gripe entirely).

Still, I finally figured out a workaround to reset the clock on my oven when I had no idea how to do it “properly”—and I have a hunch that my way is much easier and faster than the “proper” way. It only took me precisely five years and ten months to achieve this enlightenment, but an achievement is an achievement.