Author Topic: Wearing a watch  (Read 4879 times)

librarian

  • Quiet please
Wearing a watch
« on: 11 February, 2021, 05:47:02 pm »
My watches are essentially my make believe dressing up box. I have a pilots watch, dive watch, dress watch etc. My decision of what watch to wear is pretty much what would I like to pretend to be today (as I sit at my desk and reply to emails). I can't dress up like a diver, pilot or soldier (well actually I can now as I work from home during lockdown) but I can at least wear their watch. The majority of my watches are Japanese quartz, and some Japanese automatics.

The dive bezel, and stop watch functions are primarily used to time my cooking of instant noodles. I have never had to use the GMT hand of my GMT watch to work out the time, as I'm not a pilot and always stay at least a week whenever I change time zone.
I have a few radio sync watches that automatically sync with various atomic clocks around the world. These watches are normally used to check the accuracy of my non radio sync watches. I also have an electronic non quartz analogue watch where the accuracy is +/- a few seconds a year. The accuracy is fairly pointless as I'm still always a few minutes late for everything. My watch with moonphase complication should prove useful if anyone were to ask me in July roughly when did I think the Dunwich dynamo would be.

The only thing that regularly gets used, is the slide rule on my pilots watch. This is something that I fiddle with in meetings, normally doing multiplication or division, just to see if I can remember how to use a circular slide rule.

I wear my smart watch on one wrist, and a normal watch on the other. No one has ever noticed that I wear a watch on both wrists.

I was brainwashed into liking watches. Hong Kong was always the place in the world where most Rolexes were sold, and all my holidays were to visit family in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong on the shopping streets you see Rolex dealers with the same frequency that you see betting shops in the UK. People didn't buy them as they really liked them, it was just done as a form of a saving, as they don't really depreciate and you can liquidate them easily if you ever need ready cash. For years Hong Kong was the main market for Tudor, Rolex' "cheap" brand for people who can't afford a Rolex, but now I notice Tudor has come to the UK, and they want me to believe that multimillionaire David Beckham chooses to wear a Tudor watch as he likes it more than more expensive and prestigious watches.

I spent my first real wages  (summer job when I was 15) buying a Swiss watch. After a summer of working at KFC I had enough to buy a Tag Heuer Formula 1 chronograph. It looked great, but it was an unreliable piece of Swiss quartz. It taught me a valuable lesson, don't buy expensive watches.

I love watches, I just know that I have better things to spend my money on than a luxury watch eg food, mortgage etc

I will get myself a "good" watch as a present for myself for a milestone birthday a few years down the line, and then never wear it, never get it serviced, and just take it out of my drawer to look at a couple of times a year, before passing it on to my daughter in many many years time, who will not realise its value and then lose it in a house move. I have vowed not to get a Rolex, as it's my act of rebellion to all the marketing that Rolex have subjected me to. For a Rolex, you are paying for Swiss robots to cut and polish parts you never see, and technicians to certify that your watch is no way as accurate as a £10 quartz watch, but for something that is powered by a bent bit of metal, its accuracy is "superlative". You are actually paying someone to re orientate the watch every few hours, and fill in a form, so you get a certificate to confirm that upside down, your watch is as accurate as it is when it's the right way up. The trust that owns Rolex is a registered charity, so you never know what they do with their income, but a large part of their spend is paying top sportsmen to wear their watches, on the off chance that it persuades you to part with a vast sum of money, so you can then pretend to be as good as your sporting hero, as you are wearing a far cheaper version of the watch they got for free.

I've got my heart set on a Japanese high end watch, Grand Seiko, they're still the same size as watches were in the 90s, ie 37mm or smaller. They still have quartz options, where the accuracy is +/- 1 second a year. They are famous for Zaratsu polishing, where everything has a mirror finish. Although it sounds fancy, Zaratsu isn't the term for a fancy Japanese artisan technique. It's just the Japanese transliteration of the German brand of machine that they use to polish the metal. Imagine if Rolex had a watch that had a "Dremel" or "Black and Decker" polish finish (but pronounced in a Swiss accent). Grand Seiko are famous for their Spring drive watches, where the hands are powered by a spring, but it's regulated by the spring also powering a little generator to put a current through a quartz crystal which then regulates the hands with an electromagnet. This results in a very smooth sweep of the second hand, that literally no one will ever notice unless you point it out to them.

The reason watches got bigger in the 90s was Sylvester Stallone found an obscure Italian dive watch that looked ok on his massive wrist, it started a trend, and as a result every watch started to get bigger.