Punch me.
I was already in my 50s when I punched a time clock for the first time. After a year of punching, however, my employer decided that it was in their interest to let me set my own hours and work from home instead of requiring me to continue punching. This decision wasn't reached because someone suddenly understood that today's technologies make it possible to work effectively from home, but instead because it was hard to insure that a desk would be available to me where I worked during the hours I was expected to be at work. I didn't complain. Even though employers want to get the most from their employees, and that means that they want to see them going through the motions of something similar to work for the hours that they're receiving salary, I'm convinced that the time clock is destined to become a thing of the past.
That past goes back more than a century. It was in 1889, on this day of course, that Alexander Dey patented the dial time recorder. This was a precursor of the modern time clock. It consisted of a dial that the employee would point to a designated number, and then by pressing (somewhere, I'm not sure where) the time of arrival or departure was recorded on a piece of paper wrapped around a drum.
The company Dey built went on to become IBM. Perhaps there's a small amount of poetic justice in knowing that it's computers like those that IBM now manufactures that play an important role in making the punching of time clocks obsolete.
Go to: If you knew him like we knew him.