Why I Am The Clock Man

Many people have asked me, “Hey how did you end up becoming the Clock Man?”

And now is my chance to answer all of you at one time…so the next time someone asks me why I’m the Clock Man, I’ll point him towards this blog post.

The Clock Man Story is the story of an American guy who moved to Berlin, Germany. I had worked for some time in the U.S.A. as an advertising copywriter but I’d gotten burned out and disillusioned. If you happen to work as a copywriter, you probably understand how this happened There are just too many compromises you have to make as a copywriter: you have to please your Art Director, you have to please your Creative Directory, you have to please your Account Manager…and you even have to please the Client (that’s the worst). By the time a cool piece of advertising makes its way into production, the chances are pretty good that it’s a watered-down piece of drivel, if it’s managed to survive at all.

Clock Man began his career as an advertising copywriter.

Besides, I got fired. But that’s a long story, right Gary?

So, after chucking a promising career as an advertising copywriter out the window, the question was, what do I do with my B.A. in English (and Phi Beta Kappa, to boot)? I knew I didn’t want to become a teacher or have a career in academia…the academic world kind of bored me, and seemed far away from reality. I tried to write. I submitted short stories and poems (none of which were about clocks) to tiny punk rock literary publications…and even got published in about a dozen magazines of this kind. But of course this didn’t earn me any money. And I was tired of creating Latte Macchiatos with my high grade point average.

One thing I tried next was writing business correspondence for a mutual funds company. Man, was that boring. Not too much more to say about it.

Soon afterwards, I chucked that job too and ended up jobbing around yet again. I then met someone from Berlin, Germany and moved there. (This is where I still live today. Berlin rocks, dude!)

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So they loaded up the truck and moved to Berlin. Germany, that is.

It was an adventure, moving to Berlin. I couldn’t speak a word of German. So getting a job here at first was very difficult, without being able to speak the language. Here are a few of the different jobs I had in Berlin at first (but not necessarily in order):

My first job was hauling around heavy steel beams or girders at a construction site for a new bank building. It almost killed me. (I was kind of a pencil-necked geek type, really.)
My next job was sorting recyclable garbage on a conveyor belt – on the overnight shift. One word: diapers.
Then I ended up working on an apartment building renovation site. That one wasn’t too bad.
I then taught English in Berlin for a very short time, before I realized how poorly it paid and how much competition there is in this field.
I worked at a wood mill, sorting pieces of metal and debris from all the wood on the conveyor belt.
Then I found a training program sponsored by the unemployment office in Berlin. It was a training program for learning web programming. Despite having at best a poor command of the language, I was accepted into this program…and the rest is history, as they say!

If any of you are considering a career as a web developer, I heartily recommend it. It’s a lot of fun, actually. And, if you happen to live in a foreign country like me, you’ll be very pleased to discover that most programming languages are in a weird kind of English!

Code To Live, Live To Code.

So, getting into this web development class was one of the best things I ever did in my life. I quickly discovered that, probably because I was an English native speaker, I seemed to have a big advantage over the German people in my class. And I liked the work. And because I enjoyed programming websites, I was also better at it, I think.

Once this training program was finished, I got one job after another as a web developer.

If you’re a web developer in the U.S.A. and are thinking about moving to Berlin – do it.

There are some big advantages to being a native English speaker and being a programmer. German employers love it. At work, I can even send all of my emails in English. English truly is the universal language for Information Technology. (Thank god!)

And now, finally, we’re coming to the subject of Online Clock: Why I am the Clock Man.

While working as a web developer/programmer, I continued to make websites for myself, just as a hobby. It was fun…so why not?

And I kept trying to think of an idea for a website that everyone could use…because, if everyone found it useful, it’d have a good chance of becoming successful.

One night the idea of creating the world’s first Online Alarm Clock hit me like a thunderbolt, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep: