OPINION: There are 3 types of watch wearers, which one are you?
Daniel SeniaEditor’s Note: Recently we learned that there are people in the world who buy and wear broken watches. In between all the head shaking, tut-tutting and ‘what’s the watch world coming to’ etc amongst the team, we reached a surprising point. We learned that while none of us falls into this desperate and strange new category, we are, in fact, all very different watch wearers. The daily ritual for us of choosing, preparing and maintaining our watches is — if you’ll pardon the hubris — wildly dissimilar. So different that Dan took it upon himself to classify us, Indiana Jones style. These are the results of his field notes.
Perhaps naively, I’ve recently been enlightened that not everyone has the same obsession with watch wearing as I do. Until posing the question around the office, I took it as a given that setting the accurate day/date and time was just something every watch wearer did first thing in the morning. Oh, how wrong I could be! A morning ritual that I once thought was normal, after further investigation, seems to be borderline OCD. Delving further into the weird and wonderful ways other watch wearers choose to wear their timepieces, it seems we have uncovered that there are in fact three archetypal personas. We’ve decided to name them: the Patrick Bateman, the Teddy Flood (of Westworld; don’t worry, I didn’t know he had a last name either) and the Saul Goodman.
The Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale, American Psycho)
The Patrick Bateman wakes every morning to the same routine, opening his side table drawer and starting the day by picking out his timepiece of choice. The ritual begins by setting the day and time, changing the strap (if required) and winding the watch (if need be) and ensuring the watch is accurate to the millisecond. After all, why else would you own such a precise thing as a Swiss watch? Once this has been achieved, he walks to his wardrobe and proceeds to match an outfit to his pre-selected timepiece. How do I know? Because this is me, every morning.
Time: Correct to within a second.
Date: Are you kidding? Never wrong.
Daniel: “In what has become the running joke in my household, my feet generally tend not to hit the floor before I’m searching for a watch to wear for the day. It is not lost on me that this First World problem of having too many watches and not enough wrists to wear them on is already taking up way too much of my valuable time. I also have a disproportionate number of manually wound watches, which adds a new layer of complexity as my compulsion to have the correct date and time first must be kick-started by hand. Should the choice of the day be something like a vintage Rolex GMT-Master (pre quick-set date), I could effectively be hunched over my bedside table for up to 10 minutes. Until this article I had never really thought of this morning ritual as anything other than normal. Now, thanks to my colleagues in the office, I’m forced into an unwelcome self-reflection with a level of angst about this compulsion that only my therapist will be able to help me work through … but at least I’ll turn up on time.”
The Teddy Flood (James Marsden, Westworld)
The Teddy Flood has a slightly different approach to watch wearing than the methodical (shall we say Swiss) way to wear a watch. In Teddy’s world, time is a relative thing and may in fact be occurring on multiple planes, rendering days and dates effectively meaningless. The Teddy is happy to take a watch out of the drawer, give it a shake for good measure, and throw it on his wrist. He has more important things to do (like avoiding being shot) to necessarily worry about his date window’s accuracy. In the end, Teddy’s brain is the actual atomic clock to which his heart beats (or doesn’t) anyway.
Time: Generally right, sometimes give or take a minute to ensure a few minutes late to a meeting is actually on time.
Date: Meh. Fifty-fifty. Usually wrong.
Felix: “For someone who makes a living extolling the virtues of COSC-level accuracy, I am largely unfussed about a few minutes here or there in my personal life. It’s not that I don’t care, I just understand that, in the grander scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. Also, there’s a nagging doubt that if I go too far down that particular rabbit hole it’s going to end with a cesium clock and an eye twitch that won’t quite go away (see Dan, above). Also, there’s a reason I prefer my watches with no date …
The Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul)
I was only recently aware that this persona actually existed, and I’m horrified to learn that someone in the team identifies with him. The Saul Goodman is a bit of a loose cannon and generally a mess when it comes to personal organisation. A shady character, he wears that retro ’70s LED gold-plated whatever it is, but the battery stopped working years ago. The Omega (that may or may not be authentic) sitting in his drawer with the scratched crystal that’s running at +/- 15 mins a day? It’ll do the job. Especially when you’re billing by the hour.
Time: On a good day, it will be five minutes fast. On a bad day — in fact, most days — it’s telling the time it ran out of power, plus the time since it was put on.
Date: There’s a one-in-31 chance it’s right.
Andrew: “I ain’t proud of it, but I am this guy. I’m usually in a hectic rush in the morning between feeding time at the three-kids-under-four zoo and I cycle my watches so often that the odds are high it’s coming on cold with no power reserve and needs adjustment. Also, I do not currently run a watch winder. For the time to be wrong at a mid-morning check is another day in the office, unfortunately. But, in my defence your honour, if I am going to a meeting early and it’s with watch people (who notice details, who actually seek them out), I’ll take a minute to get the time right. But the date just doesn’t happen. I tend not to consult my watch for this information. It’s a phone calendar check, which removes the need for the news on the wrist. On the grind when things are going this fast, I find a vague sense of the time is all you need.”