When I was a kid, I had trouble reading clocks. This was back when people still used analog clocks pretty often. I don’t even know what percentage of parents bother to teach their children to tell time now, considering how common digital clocks are in the contemporary age. But when I was young, it was still a necessary skill, and one I couldn’t get the hang of.

This inspired my mother to create a story to help me—I’ll admit now it didn’t exactly help me, but that’s not the point—in which the main characters were the hour hand and the minute hand of a clock. The hour hand was short and fat and moved leisurely around the dial while the minute hand was tall and thin because he kept up a speedy pace.