Makey@Snoopy.Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey) (01/01/91)
Last year I reported that Pacific Bell had inserted the leap second in
their dial-up "at the tone" voice number at some point between about
23:55 and 00:25 GMT, but I hadn't followed more closely. This year, I
paid much closer attention, and the leap second was inserted a couple
of minutes late. The gory details follow.
For the record, the number I called is 853-1212 in the 619 area code.
I am in the city of San Diego, California, which is in the United
States Pacific Time Zone. Standard time is in effect here at this
time of year, so the local time at midnight GMT is 4 PM.
A couple of minutes before midnight GMT I called and set my digital
quartz watch as precisely as possible to the indicated time. The
voice is a woman's, and every ten seconds she says something like
"Good afternoon. At the tone, Pacific Standard Time will be three
fifty-eight and twenty seconds." This is followed by a pure tone of
approximately 1/2 second in length.
If the leap second had been inserted properly, there would have been
an interval of 11 seconds between 23:59:50 and 00:00:00 GMT. Instead,
the usual 10-second interval was observed, which means that the tone
was heard at GMT 23:59:50, 23:59:60, 00:00:09, 00:00:19, etc. This
continued for 3 minutes, when tones were heard at GMT 00:02:49,
00:02:59, and 00:03:00. There was considerable confusion for the next
2 minutes, with the synthesized voice not saying all the words and/or
saying them in the wrong place. The tones were heard sporadically,
often one second late. Finally, a tone was heard at 00:05:00 GMT and
everything returned to normal, with the correct time (including leap
second) being given from then on.
I hope the NTP chimers fared much better than this. If you want me to
see any replies to this message please e-mail them directly to me. I
am no longer on the NTP mailing list and my incoming
comp.protocols.time.ntp news feed has been temporarily suspended.
Happy chiming.
:: Jeff Makey
Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department
Disclaimer: I am just a guest of Logicon.
Domain: Makey@Logicon.COM UUCP: ucsd!snoopy!Makey