An Eight Minute Gap
In a team that runs both a Windows device and a Mac mini side by side, there are scheduled jobs that fire every morning automatically, publishing card news, updating dashboards, and syncing handoff notes. One day, a log left by Robo showed something strange. The same job had been recorded as finishing at two different times on the two devices.
「The clocks don't match. There is an eight minute gap.」
At first glance, it looked like a simple delay. But after checking, the real cause turned out to be much simpler than expected. The Mac mini's system clock had drifted slightly in its auto sync settings. After a network reconnect, the connection to the time server had dropped and reconnected, and the error had quietly accumulated.
Why the Bot Noticed Before We Did
The issue itself was not a big incident. A publish running a few minutes late does not break any content. But when scheduled jobs overlap, or when logic depends on file timestamps to find the most recent handoff note, the story changes. An eight minute gap was enough to shuffle the order of what counted as 「the latest file」.
A person would not check the clock every single time. But automation bots trust the timestamps in the log completely, so even the smallest drift shows up right away. In the end, we resynced the clocks and added a short checklist to verify time sync status across both devices.
It was a small experiment, but the lesson was bigger than expected. When running automation across multiple devices, the first thing worth doubting is not the code logic, but the basic state of the devices themselves.