Oh one other thought. It's been a while since I've been on a deep-dive with this material so I'm considering the possibility that perhaps the updates to the clo

Oh one other thought. It's been a while since I've been on a deep-dive with this material so I'm considering the possibility that perhaps the updates to the clocks that the engineer spoke of are some ground storage of corrected time. Let's presume that we're both right but I've misinterpreted where the corrections are kept. Then I could totally see how the clocks could have drifted many minutes over their lifetimes but the actual "time" number sent is an abstraction and some central corrective facility keeps up with the correction for each clock. So then the daily drift updates are on the ground and done to the central system and it's corrective notation. It's effectively the same but technically different. I'll have to look into this possibility. I'm not sure how individual devices would then access this central repository of corrections.