When the clocks changed, nobody really knew what to make of it. At first it was the kind of thing you’d screenshot and send to someone else with a hey, is this happening to you too? because it didn’t feel real enough to panic over. The first reports trickled in via the Internet so, you know, jokes. It was easier to assume someone had pushed a bad update than to seriously consider that time itself had done something wrong.

As it usually goes in situations like these, it stayed in that weird limbo state until it started affecting people in major population centers. Once offices couldn’t log dates correctly, once flights started filing plans for a day that technically didn’t exist, once broadcasters had to acknowledge it on live television, it stopped being funny. That was when we all finally paid attention.

By the time midnight rolled around in Australia and Japan, the world already knew it was unavoidable and unfixable. Every fix anyone tried just folded in on itself. Change the system date manually and it would reset. Pull from an external server and it would overwrite it. Shut the machine down entirely and it would come back up like nothing had happened, still insisting, forcefully, that the date was December 32nd 2025.

Looking back, it’s really silly that this was what broke the camel’s back. Just an extra square on the calendar. One year that refused to go away, and somehow that was enough to make people stop pretending things still worked the way they were supposed to. To be fair, things did ramp up after this, but still…

Sooooooooooo much 2026 New Year’s memorabilia wasted. I mean, not wasted wasted, but you get what I mean. I think, at one point, stores were giving out free those ugly “2026” glasses where your eyes fit into the 0 and the 6, alongside a bunch of other crap. I got, like, so much of it when I went back to college. Man, those were the days… My friends and I used to wear all of our 2026 memorabilia every time we went out.

Eventually though, that ended as well.