Heinrich Spoerl wrote a short humorous piece called Zeit ohne Zeit, Time Without Time, in his collection Man kann ruhig darüber sprechen. It begins: Das Merkmal des zivilisierten Menschen: Er hat keine Zeit. Statt dessen hat er eine Uhr. The mark of civilized man is that he has no time. Instead he has a watch. Spoerl describes people who set their watches wrong on purpose. Some set it ten minutes slow, so that the watch can serve as an excuse with the boss or the wife. Others set it a quarter of an hour fast, to force themselves to be punctual. Aber da man Bescheid weiß, zieht man die Viertelstunde in Gedanken wieder ab, und alles bleibt beim alten. But since one knows, one subtracts the quarter hour again in one’s head, and everything stays as it was.