Fall Back

In case you somehow missed it, Daylight Savings Time ended at 2 a.m. Sunday, but the white-gloved workers at the Torneau store were on the case long before then:

Time is the enemy of the New Yorker. There is never enough of it. So there was something euphoric about the scene yesterday inside Tourneau TimeMachine in Manhattan, where white-gloved workers were busy setting the store’s 8,000 wristwatches back an hour. For once, people got a second chance.

Officially, the end of daylight saving time struck at 2 a.m. this morning. But, as Richard E. Gellman, a Tourneau vice president, explained, the world’s largest watch store needs a head start. It will take workers three days to turn all the little knobs on the sides of all the watches to the previous hour, a significant effort undertaken each October, in accordance with the Uniform Time Act of 1966, as a courtesy to the customer.

“It’s a very big deal,” Mr. Gellman said. “We’re all about time.”

. . .

Later in the afternoon, Mr. Gellman greeted a man dressed as a floppy-eared Dalmatian. He was not shopping for a new Rolex. He was Hot Dog, the Fire Department’s fire safety mascot, visiting the store to remind people to change the batteries of their smoke detectors when they reset their clocks. Three firefighters stood with him in the bucket of a fire truck’s mechanical ladder and pretended to change the hands of the giant clock outside the store.

The clock, controlled by a computer, was not budging for anyone before its automatic resetting at 2 a.m. The tinier ones in the display cases are not as self-sufficient.

Robert Marcomeni, 42, who works at the store, said he had reset about 250 watches since Friday. He took a pragmatic approach to the task, and to the whole notion of daylight saving time. “You don’t question it,” he said. “You just do it.”