The speaker gives us an exact time of day — "ten a.m." — which at first falsely implies their omniscience over the situation. Until it is revealed they are just a passerby in their car and not an all-seeing third-person narrator. Its specificity also serves to imply that the housewife is alone, as her husband would be at work and her children at school during this hour. This adds to some of the suggestive tension within the poem.