History Main / ClockDiscrepancy

** ''[[Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventureStardustCrusaders Stardust Crusaders]]'': Hol Horse is told that he'll be able to kill Jotaro if he shoots into a pipe at noon sharp. After some rather humorous attempts to set up the attack, Hol Horse fires his weapon the instant he sees that it's noon... only for every shot to miss their mark as a result of Hol Horse's watch going at a facer pace, which caused him to fire too early.

When this happens because someone manipulated the clock, you have a case of ClockTampering. Compare MagicCountdown. Contrast RightOnTheTick.

* Happens occasionally in ''Manga/CaseClosed''; once, a police officer realized that his roommate was up to no good because he kept all of his clocks 5 minutes fast to make sure he was never late to work, but the roommate reset the clocks to read accurately as part of his plot to fudge with his alibi. (Fortunately, more substantial proof of guilt is also found.)
* In one episode of ''Manga/DetectiveSchoolQ'', Q class uses a sound stage to fake a news report about a large department store being evacuated because of a bomb threat. The time on the news report is several minutes later than the actual time. This was done to trick the person who placed the bomb in the actual department store (Which was too large to search effectively in the time available) into believing that the bomb had already gone off, and then gloating about where he had hidden it after the explosion.

** This was particularly noticeable when railways were first introduced: before then, most clocks were set to local noon, but railway timetables needed to run on a single time to avoid accidents. Early rail station clocks in the UK had 2 times shown: local and London. Over time this resulted in standardisation of times and more formal time zones.

--> In most parts of the world, the switch away from Daylight Saving Time proceeds smoothly. But the time change raised havoc with Palestinian terrorists in 1999. Israel insisted on a premature switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time to accommodate a week of pre-sunrise prayers. Palestinians refused to live on "Zionist Time." Two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued. Nobody knew the "correct" time. At precisely 5:30pm on Sunday, September 5th, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing three terrorists who were transporting the bombs. It was initially believed that the devices had been detonated prematurely by klutzy amateurs. A closer look revealed the truth behind the explosions. The bombs had been prepared in a Palestine-controlled area and set to detonate on Daylight Saving Time. But the confused drivers had already switched to Standard Time. When they picked up the bombs, they neglected to ask whose watch was used to set the timing mechanism. As a result, the cars were still en route when the explosives detonated, delivering the terrorists to their untimely demises.

** Even worse, some stations are out-of-sync with others in the area.
* Averting this trope led to various railway companies spending hefty sums commissioning exceptionally accurate and reliable timepieces for station employees, which are now highly prized collector's items. The practice largely faded away in the last quarter of the 20th century as digital systems started taking over signalling and other train control systems, but as late as the turn of the millennium, Virgin Railways made a show of issuing its staff with fancy digital watches synched to Greenwich Mean Time by radio.

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

* In an ''[[ComicBook/ArchieComics Archie comic]]'', BigEater Jughead is in class and informs the teacher Miss Grundy that "his stomach" says it's lunchtime. She reminds Jug that the clock on the wall reads 10 before noon. At that moment, the school janitor Mr. Svenson enters the classroom with a ladder. The purpose? To adjust the clock, which he said was running ten minutes slow.

* In the [[Franchise/DanganRonpa Danganronpa]] fanfic ''Fanfic/FracturedFates'', this comes up during the first class trial. On the night of the murder, Rumi claims to have seen Azami coming out of the library at 9:15 PM before the two went to their respective bedrooms. The discrepancy comes in that none of the three students who were in the main hall at 9:18 PM (Shiro, Kaneki, and Asuna) saw the two, which would have been impossible because Azami and Rumi would have had to have passed through the main hall to get to the bedrooms. The reason for the contradiction is that [[spoiler:Rumi didn't have her e-Handbook on her and as a result asked Azami for the time when they ran into each other. Azami, the killer, then lied to her about what time it was in order to make Rumi think it was earlier than it really was, thus creating a fake alibi for the time of the murder.]]

* In the 1981 film ''Film/{{Gallipoli}}'' an artillery officer fails to synchronize his watch, so the bombardment stops several minutes before the Australian troops are due to attack, leading to a massacre.
* In the film ''Film/{{Gremlins}}'', one of the rules for handling mogwai was to never NEVER feed them after midnight (as turns out, it turns them into gremlins). One night the mogwai in the box were making noises like they were hungry. The alarm clock says it's about 11:30, so the boy feeds them some leftover chicken. The next day, [[StoppedClock the boy notices the clock reading the exact same time]]. Seems the extension cord had been ripped from the plug, the mogwai actually chewed through the electrical cord, [[OhCrap so it was after midnight]] after all.

[[folder:Visual Novels]]

* ''WesternAnimation/AmericanDad''. "The American Dad After School Special": Stan puts an Exploding Collar on his son, set to go off if he doesn't ask a girl out in 24 minutes. As he's running down the street, he remarks that his Timex watch shows he still has 5 minutes left, then immediately sees a newspaper with the headline "Timex Recalls Watches For Being Four Minutes Slow."

* The first season finale of ''WesternAnimation/TheRaccoons'', "Gold Rush", plays with this trope. Cyril Sneer is planning to shut down the Raccoons' crusading newspaper, The Evergreen Standard, with the help of Mr. Knox. Cyril's plan involved cutting off the supply of ink and paper to the Standard and forcing it out of business. For his plan to work, the deal had to be finalized under a deadline. [[spoiler: However, Cyril is contacted by Mr. Knox that the deal is off because he missed the deadline - which saves the newspaper. Cyril is clearly confused as his clock indicates he had time to spare before the deadline. His son Cedric Sneer reminds him that years ago, the clocks were [[HoistByHisOwnPetard intentionally set back earlier so that he could get more work out of his employees]]!]]

* ''Film/BackToTheFuture''

* ''OCPU Prison'' by Creator/SvenHassel. The fire control officer fails to synchronize his watch with the other officers; he ends up dropping the artillery bombardment on his own troops.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheBatman'' has an episode where the title character notes that his atomic clock is much faster than his watch, due to the VillainOfTheWeek possessing ResetButton powers.

* Happens in ''Series/HogansHeroes'' when LeBeau must climb up a dumbwaiter to steal strategic plans from a banquet hall before bombs that the Heroes planted go off. LeBeau manages to get up, steal the plans, and get back down, handing off the plans to their French Underground contact at the exact moment the bombs explode. The heroes are congratulating Carter on his expert bomb-making skills when they notice he's looking at his watch with great concern and ask him what's wrong.

** In ''Mr. Monk Takes Manhattan'' Disher buys a watch from a street-corner salesman in New York City who claims it is accurate. However, this is shown not to be the case when Disher remarks on its ability to show times all around the world and says "it's 5:30 here; in Denver, 3:30; in California, 12:17; and in Paris, France... time has stopped." The troubles with the watch prove to be critical because it sets off an alarm at a crucial time. The characters almost get caught because the instructions are only written in Korean and so they can't figure out how to turn the sound off.

[[folder:Film]]

* In an ''[[ComicBook/ArchieComics Archie comic]]'', BigEater Jughead is in class, and informs the teacher, Miss Grundy, that "his stomach" says its lunchtime. She reminds Jug that the clock on the wall reads 10 before noon. At that moment, the school janitor Mr. Svenson enters the classroom with a ladder. The purpose? To adjust the clock, which he said was running ten minutes slow.

* A ''Franchise/ScoobyDoo'' comic book story, "The Faceless Phantom" has the gang helping a scientist who has created a machine that can send people from one end of the country to another. Shaggy and Scooby are volunteered to be flown to New York, go through the machine, and arrive back California in very little time. But Fred figures the machine is a fake because on a TV monitor he sees the clock behind Shaggy who is supposedly in New York--it's the same time as on the clock where Fred, Daphne, Velma and the scientist are when there should be a three-hour gap (Also, a flight manifest Fred gets from the FAA shows that Shaggy and Scooby's flight never went to New York. It U-turned back to an adjacent building where the scientist's "invention" was stationed).

** Marty is at Doc Brown's house, and thinks he will be on time for school, only to discover all his clocks are a half hour slow.
** Doc Brown proves to Marty that the time machine works by syncronizing watches with a digital clock he attaches to his dog, then sending the dog one minute into the future. When the dog shows up again, his clock is a minute slower than Doc's.

* In ''Film/SevenChances'', the hero must find a girl and marry her before the clock strikes 7 p.m., but misses the deadline by a couple of minutes. As he walks away in despair, his eye fall on the church clock which displays 6.58 p.m. Apparently, the hero's watch ran fast, so he rushes back to marry his girl in time.

* Jeffrey Deaver's short story "Fast" has Katheryn Dance interrogate a prisoner to find out where a bomb is set to detonate. Once the clock hits the appointed time, he's taken out hears some reports about numbers of people killed, and an ambitious reporter asks him why he picked those people as victims. After he gloats, the cops immediate relay the information and are able to evacuate the site before the bomb goes off. Dance explains the clock in the interrogation room was "Fast".
* The ''Literature/LordPeterWimsey'' novel ''Have His Carcase'' has a discrepancy that's based on medical evidence rather than timepieces. [[spoiler: Harriet finds the body of the victim with still-liquid blood pooled around it; then the body is washed out to sea before it can be autopsied. Peter and Harriet spend most of the book assuming the murder happened almost immediately before she found the body, because the blood didn't have time to clot; in actuality, the victim was a hemophiliac and the murder happened several hours earlier.]]

* ''Literature/NickVelvet'': In "The Theft of Twenty-Nine Minutes", Nick is hired to 'steal' [[IntangibleTheft 29 minutes]] from the passengers on a pleasure cruise; i.e. cause them to lose 29 minutes without realising anything has happened. He does so by working as a StageMagician on the cruise, and collecting everyone's watches for a trick. (The story predates the ubiquity of mobile phones which would have this stunt more difficult, but not impossible.) Over the course of this act, he resets all of the watches by 29 minutes, before returning them as the grand finale of his act, leaving no one any the wiser.

* ''Literature/TornadoBrain'': The night of Colette's disappearance, she visited Frankie to ask to borrow their childhood notebook, and also visited Tess to ask for a scarf. Both sisters are confident that she visited at exactly 6:45 and stayed for several minutes, even though she couldn't have been both places at once. [[spoiler:Tess later realizes that she forgot to reset her clock for daylight savings, meaning Colette actually visited her at 7:45.]]

** In a case of a literal "clock discrepancy" (versus a "time discrepancy"), one episode featured victims whose watches were all set to wildly different and inaccurate times. The team knew it had to be a clue, but couldn't figure out what it could possibly be, until they got a watch that was stopped and figured out that the unsub had set all the watches to 6:22 at the time of death. Then they're still stumped, until they convert that to military time and get 18:22, which corresponds to a Bible passage regarding homophobia, making them realize it's a hate crime.

* In ''Series/{{Ghostwriter}}'', one of the main characters is accused of burning a one-man run electronic store. His friends were able to prove him innocent when they discover that the store's display clock was running one hour slow, meaning he has an alibi for the actual time of the crime. The store owner, however, doesn't, and he ends up being the real culprit, as he was trying to destroy evidence of a [[DigitalPiracyIsEvil mass videotape duplication system]].

* This has cropped up in a few episodes of ''Series/JonathanCreek'' as part of the solution to the mystery, most notably in "Miracle in Crooked Lane" whereby a ill woman was convinced that morning was evening, in order to provide a alibi for a murder.

** In the episode "Mr. Monk and the Rapper", a rapper named Murderuss is suspected of killing his rival rapper Extra Large with a time bomb in the exact same matter as he described in his song "Car Bomb". However, it turns out that Murderuss is innocent and that Extra Large was not the intended target. The bomber was trying to target the person who was in the limo before the victim, and failed to account for the fact that Daylight Savings Time started that day. And so the bomb went off an hour later than it was supposed to.

* In a ''Series/PerryMason'' movie, a witness claims to have overheard the victim and the defendant arguing at a certain time. Later, when the woman's teenage daughter testifies, Mason notes a discrepancy between when she claimed to have arrived at home and when the doorman in her building noted it (of approximately 30 minutes). The girl is forced to admit that she set ''all'' of the clocks in the house back 30 minutes so that she could spend more time with her boyfriend (her mother did not watch TV). Thus, her mother was wrong about when she heard the sounds of the struggle and the defendant now had an alibi for the time in question.

* ''Series/{{Reno 911}}'': A psychic tells Jones that he'll lose one of his testicles by midnight. He spends to episode worrying about it, and he's relieved when a clock shows that it's past midnight. Then someone mentions that clock is a little fast; cue testicle injury.

* In an episode of ''Series/VeronicaMars'' three of her friends are involved in a version of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, where two of them are guards and one is a prisoner. The guards have to extract a piece of information from the prisoners before a deadline. Veronica's friend pretend to fall asleep and let the prisoners escape. This turns out to be a ruse to set the clock forward. After letting them out at the appointed time, they ask for the information, which is provided by one of the prisoners (Veronica's prisoner friend shouted out "NO" to no avail; after years of hanging out with her he knew enough of her tricks to recognize the trap a moment too late). Once they have the information, the professor of the class declares the guards the winners, displaying his watch with the correct time.

* In the pilot episode of ''Series/TheXFiles'' Mulder & Scully get affected by a few minutes of MissingTime - there's a big bright light, and then the next thing they know it's 9 minutes later. Mulder marks the spot where it happened. Nothing comes of it at the time except to demonstrate Mulder's belief in the extranatural; but then in an episode [[BrickJoke years later]] it happens again and it turns out they're at the exact same spot.

--> In most parts of the world, the switch away from Daylight Saving Time proceeds smoothly. But the time change raised havoc with Palestinian terrorists in 1999. Israel insisted on a premature switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time to accommodate a week of pre-sunrise prayers. Palestinians refused to live on "Zionist Time." Two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued. Nobody knew the "correct" time. At precisely 5:30pm on Sunday, September 5th, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing three terrorists who were transporting the bombs. It was initially believed that the devices had been detonated prematurely by klutzy amateurs. A closer look revealed the truth behind the explosions. The bombs had been prepared in a Palestine-controlled area, and set to detonate on Daylight Saving Time. But the confused drivers had already switched to Standard Time. When they picked up the bombs, they neglected to ask whose watch was used to set the timing mechanism. As a result, the cars were still en-route when the explosives detonated, delivering the terrorists to their untimely demises.

* On ''Series/CriminalMinds'', the profilers trick a captured terrorist into revealing his co-conspirators' target by manipulating his sense of time, then letting him think the planned attack had already taken place. It wasn't done with a physical clock, it was done by [[{{Gaslighting}} altering the terrorist's prayer time slightly at each point, distorting his internal sense of time]]. Gideon even pointed out that using an actual clock would have probably failed as it would have been more obvious.

* A ''Series/ForensicFiles'' episode has a suspect's supposedly airtight alibi--that he was on a fishing trip with his family, which they'd recorded--being torn apart by this. Aside from finding odd that someone would feel the need to tape a random outing like this, they noticed that the man kept glancing at his watch and soon noticed a discrepancy between the time on his watch, the time indicated on the tape, and the angle of the sun, and realize that the man tampered with the tape to create his alibi.

* ''Series/{{MASH}}'': A soldier who they're trying to keep alive through December 25th so his kids don't have to remember Christmas as "the day Daddy died" dies at about 11:35pm. Hawkeye moves the hands of the clock so that it's 12:10am, saying "Hey look he made it." They falsify the death certificate.