Clock King: Difference between revisions

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* In a Norwegian short story, the victim was so obsessed with punctuality and performing every mundane task at the precise same second each day, that his killer was able to kill him by slowing his clock down by 30 seconds, thereby making him miss his bus, throwing him into a completely fuddled state and inducing a fatal heart attack.
* The Master Timekeeper (called the Ticktockman, but not to his face) in [[Harlan Ellison]]'s short story "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" not only is a Clock King but he runs the entire world on time and on schedule.
* Malvolio Bent of the'' [[Discworld]]'' novel ''[[Discworld/Making Money|Making Money]]'', who resets the bank's clock every day when it falls two seconds behind. The earlier novel ''[[Discworld/Thief of Time|Thief of Time]]'' features Jeremy Clockson, a clockmaker who produces the world's most accurate timepieces and is implied to have assaulted or possibly even killed another member of the guild for deliberately setting his clock fast. {{spoiler|The latter turns out to be Time itself.}}
* The Daemon, of Danial Suarez's eponymous novel, is this. All the way. To the power of n.
* [[The Thrawn Trilogy|Grand Admiral Thrawn]] is quite adept at [[Xanatos Speed Chess]], but his initial plans often involve very precise timing. He acquires an ally ([[The Starscream|sort of]]) who has the ability to coordinate his forces to an even higher degree, but only rarely used him for that, since his fleets could execute simultaneous attacks just fine. Notably in ''[http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/1095271.html Heir To The Empire]'', he [http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/4161/17405510.jpg observed] that two ships had connected for four minutes, fifty-three seconds, and knew not only that three people had transferred, but which people went to which ship and where they were going. Thrawn's scary like that.
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== Real Life ==
* Immanuel Kant was famous for being one, especially in his later years. According to a famous anecdote, the inhabitants of Koenigsberg set their clocks on his daily walks, and the one day he wasn't on time, it was because he had just heard about [[the French Revolution]] breaking out. Or reading ''Emile'' by Rousseau.
* Any decent military commander in [[World War I]] was required to be something of a Clock King, since portable communication devices did not exist at the time.
* London bobbies in the early days had to walk a precise beat at a strictly regimented pace (including length of stride). This was because there were no telephones and few police stations in those days, so any citizen who'd witnessed a crime-in-progress would have to know where to go at a particular time of day to be certain of finding a policeman.
* Railroads in the UK and US forced standardization of times and time zones to allow uniform train schedules, needed to prevent catastrophic collisions.
* UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is reportedly like this. According to one source, he plans his daily routine in ''five-minute blocks''.
* If you're in a class where every student doesn't take the exact same courses, a Clock King is useful for two reasons. First of all this person will know where his or her classmates are and secondly because he or she knows where you're supposed to be at the very moment.
 
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