I think of this another way: why should a &quot;get current time&quot; function <i>ever</i> return an error? And what is someone to do about that case anyway? The time it returns may be wrong, but I think such a function shouldn&#x27;t be capable of returning &quot;error&quot;, as adding that path just increases complexity needlessly without much additional benefit; with the current time being used often in things like error logging, introducing an &quot;error on top of an error&quot; is not a good idea. Defaulting to January 1, 1970 or December 31, 1969 would be sufficient.