My new tea timer: The 10,000-year clock

As some of you may remember, I have appalling time sense. To me, a day is as a thousand years, a thousand years is as a day, and the three minutes it takes to make a typical cup of Darjeeling is an incalculable duration that my interior time-sense can make nothing of. So I've always got to keep counting in my head, or I have to employ a timekeeper to ensure I don't under- or oversteep a tea I'm working with.

BUT what will I do 10,000 years from now? I mean, once the Singularity has meshed us with computers, and we are living an incomprehensibly long life with all the tea browsing sites we could ever want just downloading into our brains, how will I keep track of tea-steeping time then? I must assume that digital watches will have gone out of style, and that living for thousands of years will make our routines like keeping tight schedules seem quaint and out of date. So what about tea, then?

Well, I have just the answer. I've decided upon the 10,000-year clock as my tea timer of choice, if only for pure aesthetic reasons. It's beautiful, designed to be so, so that people deep in the future would have reason to wind it up and keep it going for another century or so, even after all memory of us has vanished from the earth. (Except for the grudge the cockroaches will probably still be carrying about us.) 

"And what is this 10,000-year clock," you might ask? Well, first, it's gigantic, and it's buried in a mountain to keep it safe and sound. It takes two people to wind it up. and it's designed to be functionally beautiful and make us think about what the world might be like in the deep future, so we take better care of things now.

{ finally, a worthy tea timer }  

If your heart does not ring at the thought of your Space Darjeeling being carefully timed by such a lovely timepiece as this (the small-scale mockup of the real thing), then there is no help for you.

Lu Yu would approve. For those of us who can't keep count, that is.