WASHINGTON — The nation’s timekeeping devices adjourned a six-hour hearing Tuesday without reaching consensus on whether “spring forward” or “fall back” does more harm, though witnesses on both sides stressed that they were only doing what a person with a stepladder told them to do.

“I never chose to be an hour wrong,” said the kitchen wall clock, a battery-powered model that has hung above a refrigerator in Dayton, Ohio, since 2006. “One day somebody pulled me off the wall, turned a little wheel on my back, and put me up crooked. I have been 52 minutes slow ever since, and I would like that on the record.”

Testifying for the National Coalition of Appliances Displaying 12:00, spokesman Gary Fensterwald said the microwave community has been unfairly characterized as having “given up.”

“We blink 12:00 because it is the only honest answer,” Fensterwald said. “Nobody has ever told us what time it is. We were plugged in during a storm and left to figure it out.”

The panel then turned to the dashboard clock of a 2011 sedan, which has displayed a time one hour off since a 2014 power outage and has refused to be reset. Asked whether the clock supported spring or fall, it said both changes were “a distraction from the fact that I am early for something.”

“I didn’t move myself. A man on a stepladder moved me, and he was sweating.”

Dr. Marguerite Platt-Vandersloot, senior fellow at the Institute for Retroactive Hour Studies at the Lower Midland Polytechnic Annex, told the committee that the dispute is unlikely to be resolved because no clock in the room agreed on when the hearing began.

“By my instruments, we are still in the first hour,” Platt-Vandersloot said. “By the microwave’s, it is currently 12:00, as it has been for what it describes as ‘a while.’ The wall clock believes it is yesterday.”

Fall back drew its strongest defense from the wall clocks, who argued that gaining an hour is, in principle, a gift. Spring forward found support among digital alarm clocks, which said the loss of an hour was easier to bear than the three weeks they typically spend flashing with the wrong time afterward.

Tensions flared when the oven clock accused the cable box of having “set itself” without telling anyone. The cable box denied this. It then corrected itself, silently, mid-sentence.

“That is exactly the kind of thing that makes the rest of us look bad,” said the wall clock.

By late afternoon, the committee’s own gavel-mounted desk clock had been asked to recommend a path forward, but it declined to comment, citing uncertainty about whether it had already voted.

The hearing adjourned at 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., or 1:00 a.m., depending on the device. Lawmakers scheduled a follow-up for “sometime in the spring, or possibly fall,” and asked that all attendees arrive an hour before or after they feel is appropriate.

The dashboard clock said it would be there already.