In recent weeks, a pair of Budapest’s most prominent public clocks – located in Pest’s Nyugati Square and Buda’s Széll Kálmán Square – have stopped working, despite both of them being less than two years old. While it seems that resetting these digital timepieces would be relatively easy, there is no sign that either of them will be repaired anytime soon, leaving us to wonder – has a mysterious villain hacked into Budapest’s computerized clocks to disable them as part of a global conspiracy? Will the “Time Bandit” be brought to justice before it’s too late? And how will we know when that is?

In 2015, downtown Pest’s Nyugati Square was elaborately renovated, complete with a new digitized rotating clock to replace a similar clock that stood in the same spot, which had operated for decades with flashing light bulbs instead of the high-tech multicolor LED lights that power the new timepiece. However, for several weeks now, Nyugati’s futuristic clock has gone dark.

Meanwhile, over in Buda’s Széll Kálmán Square – which was thoroughly refurbished just a few months ago, with its new 18-million-forint digital clock being presented as the plaza’s proud centerpiece – passersby here are now also left in the dark as to what time it is. During December, the LED lights of this modern-styled clock started flashing in random patterns, before showing the wrong time for quite a few days, and then finally going entirely blank about two weeks ago.

Considering that both of these clocks are newfangled digital devices, it seems that repairing them wouldn’t be too difficult – but apparently this task has been complicated by technical issues beyond the grasp of ordinary city officials, as Hungarian media reports on this topic reveal a great deal of finger-pointing between government agencies and the contractors who built the clocks, with no specific indication of when they will function again. What could have caused both of these almost-new clocks to malfunction so mysteriously?

After carefully considering all of the possibilities behind this situation, we can only come to one reasonable conclusion – some nefarious super-villain must be hacking into the clocks’ computer systems to disable them, in an attempt to make Budapest’s workforce chronically late and thus sow the seeds of societal chaos that will severely damage Hungary’s economy, making the entire country vulnerable to some grand global conspiracy.

Will Budapest’s “Time Bandit” soon be discovered and brought to justice by Hungary’s version of James Bond? We certainly hope so – after all, the clock is ticking… or not, in this case.

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Már 15 éve lélegzünk összhangban a fővárossal. Jubileumi kiadványunkban mindent megtalálsz, ami magazinunk és eddigi munkánk esszenciája. Gasztronómia, kultúra, városi legendák és Budapest arcai, interjúk, történetek és a legjobb helyek – úgy, ahogyan mi látjuk a fővárost.

Rendeld meg itt vagy keresd a nagyobb könyvesboltokban!

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