A laboratory clock would lose less than a second since the beginning

Optical atomic clocks have reached fractional uncertainties around 10⁻¹⁸. Kept up across the age of the universe, that fraction is less than a second.

An optical clock locks a laser to the frequency of a jump in a trapped atom or ion — strontium, ytterbium, aluminium — and counts the cycles. The best of them, in the 2010s and since, have demonstrated uncertainties near one part in 10¹⁸. The universe is about 14 billion years old, which is about 4 × 10¹⁷ seconds. Multiply. The accumulated error is a fraction of a second. The same clocks can tell which of two identical instruments is a centimetre higher in Earth’s gravity, because time runs faster upstairs, a fact this library already keeps.

These are not devices you wind. They are tables of lasers, vacuum chambers, and shields against stray fields. Comparing two of them is itself an experiment. The point of the absurd comparison is the size of the achievement, not a claim that someone started a stopwatch at the beginning of time.