Checked Only When the Timer Was Installed
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The box had been off for twenty hours, and nothing anywhere had recorded it going down. When it came back, the timers it had slept through fired at once, because each is told that a missed run is a run owed. One debt was a small watcher routine whose slot is ten in the morning. It paid at nineteen minutes past seven in the evening, inside the hours the system’s founding document says nothing may touch.
The document is the north-star file, and those hours are its only configuration: a block of weekday evenings, the weekends, a nightly quiet window, and the timezone to judge them in. Under them sits one sentence with a period of its own: “No scheduled routine fires, and no alert pages me, inside these windows. Period.”
The promise was enforced at the wrong moment. Each routine’s schedule was checked against the windows when its timer was installed, and from then on the schedule was trusted. A timer that fires on time never breaks that. A timer that fires late fires whenever the box wakes, and nothing between the wake and the run asked what time it was. The weekly review caught it only because its drift scan counts fires from the routines’ own logs, never registrations from the schedules.
The fix moved the question to fire time. The dispatcher every routine runs through now asks a guard before each run. If the invocation came from a timer rather than a hand, and the command is on the registry of scheduled routines, and the instant falls inside a protected window, it writes one skip line to the routine’s own log and exits successfully. The unit stays green and the next normal slot does the work. A hand-run never skips. The timers keep their catch-up flag, because a missed run is still owed; it is just no longer owed at that minute. If the guard cannot read its config it lets the run through, and the drift scan is still there behind it.
That scan now files the evening fire, and the two before it, as history, since the class cannot recur. Any later one is a regression.
Protected time, then: hours written once, and read by the thing that fires each routine at the moment it fires. The schedule was only ever a forecast of the promise.