Dean Christakos« Reasons to hate DC #27593463 | Main | Reflections on July 4th »
February 13, 2007
On Watches
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| The finest watch that $50 can buy in Chinatown, New York City |
I have never been impressed with pricey watches. I mean, I appreciate the idea of them as basically the only piece of jewelry that a man will typically wear. Also, as an engineer, I find the mechanical intricacies of timekeeping to be pretty fascinating. I'm sure in a pre-computer age, I would be excited about the prospect of being a watchmaker. At the same time, it's almost always hard for me to be impressed by something that just tells the time and just has a rolling 31-day numerical display to indicate the day of the month. Part of the issue is that I've grown up in the age of computers. Writing my own calendar program that can calculate the correct date for the next 400 years by getting the leap-year calculations correct is fairly easy (leap year every four years, except on years divisible by 100 but not by 400). I mean, I figure if I'm going to spend big money on a watch, it at least needs to be able to tell me something that I could calculate with a few lines of code, right?
When I was in high school, my father bought me Citizen watch (similar to this one, but less expensive, as I remember). It had no problem being in the water, dealing with sports activities, or just about anything else that a teenager puts it through, and I never took it off (ever-- I showered with it until I realized that the soap was corroding the plastic strap, forcing me to replace it fairly often). It told the day of the week and the month, and I figured when I was older, I would get one with more advanced timekeeping abilities. I ended up losing it, unfortunately, during the move from California to Cambridge back in 1998. Really, was it too much to expect that if I were going to spend more than $100 on a watch, it should be able to do more than a watch I owned as a teenager and cost half as much was able to do? This watch looks almost exactly the same, but doesn't even tell the day of the week-- and costs almost $5000.
I found out, however, that trying to get a (non-digital) watch that tells the month as well as the day and the date is almost impossible. Well, it is possible, but it will cost thousands and thousands of dollars. I'm not impressed. Ok, I'm a little impressed, but not tens of thousands of dollars impressed.
Posted by Dean at February 13, 2007 12:06 AM
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