A true and harrowing tale of Windows

A little while ago I set out to reserve a zipcar for tomorrow morning. I went to the website, plugged in the date information, and got nothing but an error message. "Pickup time is in the past," it said. In red. I double checked. It looked right. I clicked on the calendar gizmo. It only showed dates from September. I confirmed with a co-worker that the present month is, in fact, August. I frowned.

Because I didn't just fall off the turnip truck it occurred to me that the problem might be with my computer rather than with Zipcar's website. So it was off to the Date & Time control panel for me. Just as I thought, my computer had the date wrong. Easy enough to fix manually, but as I like to have everything as accurate as possible I decided to use an internet time server. I clicked on the appropriate button and my computer checked things out with Microsoft's internet time server.

There was only one problem. The time server -- time.windows.com -- had the date wrong. No worries. Microsoft thoughtfully gives you the option of using the time server run by the naval observatory. So I clicked on the appropriate button and waited. And waited. And waited. "An error occurred," Windows helpfully informed me.