When the door stands ajar, you can’t help but look in.

It is too odd a workspace not to: clock faces covering the walls, shelves brimming with these retro time-keepers, some round, some square, some wood, some metal, all of them no doubt watched—or raced— by many a student.

For two decades, this nook in the tunnel beneath the Russell Building was the workshop of now-retired Larry Grimshire, who maintained the roughly 700 clocks on the Fort Garry campus, even manually winding the hands of one grandfather clock forward or backward, twice a year.

These days, most clock updates are done through wifi (but some still require a personal touch).