The Eleventh Hour

Funny how time can slip into almost any topic, interpolating into the most mundane of subjects, tick, tick, tick. And so now, it seems we have slipped into the eleventh hour with this blog.

Watch out! (Or, what’s the deal with changing out watch straps?)

Young man looking up at Sistine Chapel, Rome, 1971

One of the most frustrating things about some watches is how they are near impossible to change out the bracelets or straps. I’ve been wrestling with a couple of watches lately, and it’s kind of turning me off to the watch world. OK, OK, first world problem. But it’s also a time issue. And seeing as watches are timepieces, the amount of time I must take to change out a strap should be a consideration, as much as what kind of movement the watch has, shouldn’t it? Anyway, here I am with two exceptional watches that do not want me to mess with their bracelets and straps.

A call out to the (analog) watch industry: You want to know why you are alienating your customer base and risk losing market share to Apple and the digital watch world?

I’ll give it to you straight. I’m new here. And I don’t have a lot of time. I have expendable income, but limited patience. I spent a career in sales, so I have absolutely no tolerance for bullshit.

So, when I saw a recent piece on Wrist Enthusiast, titled, “The Celebrities with the ‘Lefty’ Rolex GMT-Master II 126720 VTNR,” I got suckered into reading it. I am left-handed, left-handed watches are of interest to me. But what I read, and more importantly, saw, was a display of unrestrained hedonism and narcissistic drivel that was a Grade A Certified masterful waste of time.

The Last Time

One of the things a newbie will do, when they fall into the rabbit hole of watch collecting, is to fall in love with often disparate watches. For instance, I fell for the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Titanium watch. But I also really liked the Certina DS Action GMT, which cost a tenth of what the Bulgari did. My watch guru was real good about encouraging me to go for it when I mentioned the Bulgari, the Tudor and the Omega. But when I mentioned I was interested in the Certina, while he wasn’t discouraging (“Certina watches are well- known for precision, reliability and sporty character”), I could tell he wouldn’t be the one to recommend that watch to me. But he didn’t channel his inner Mick Jagger and recycle old song lyrics:

♫ Well I told you once and I told you twice
But ya never listen to my advice ♫

I noted his neutral stance. I realized he wasn’t recommending the watch, but he also wasn’t holding me back from buying it. If it was a mistake, it was something I had to learn on my own. In other words, he was being a good guru.

What time do you have?

How many times, over the years, has someone, out of the blue, come up to you and asked “Do you have the time?” (or was it a dime?) And, did you ever wonder if they were asking you just for the time? One little thing I have learned, in my short time as a watch enthusiast, is that this obsession with time and timepieces goes far beyond the instruments we wear on our wrists.

The Hands of Time

 

I recently realized that I have a fascination with the hands of watches. So much in fact that now it will probably influence how I buy watches in the future. Much like calibers, the hands express the care and precision a watchmaker puts into their creations.

I was looking at the time on one of my wrist watches the other day, and it hit me – Hey, I really like the hands on this watch! Conversely, other watches have hands that take a little getting used to. And oddly enough, for me, it doesn’t have to do with how much money the watch costs. I’m not going to get all geeky and technical about this. There is a good piece about watch hands on Unwound, Crown and Caliber’s watch blog, called The Nicknames of Watch Hands. It covers the technical part pretty well.

Really, what I am drawn to is the esthetic side of the design of watch hands. Some are delicate, some are brawny. Some are whimsical and some are all business.

The “Go Everywhere” Watch

The French Riviera in the summer of '85

During a leisurely lunch with my watch loving friend, the notion of the “go everywhere” timepiece surfaced. “A watch like X, you can take anywhere. Swimming in the Mediterranean, showering, the sauna. Even lovemaking.” Wait. What? Lovemaking? “Whatever happened to being naked?” I queried.

“Well, you are naked. You’re just wearing a watch, for Chrissake.” My friend defines nudity differently than I do. None the less, I saw his point. And so, I asked myself the burning horological question, “Is there a go everywhere watch?”

The “One and Only” Wine Test for Watch Getting

I came from the wine trade, and before I fell into the horological rabbit hole, there was an exercise I would often do when I tried and liked a wine. It went like this: “Is this wine a wine I could live with, day in and day out, possibly even as the one and only wine I would ever enjoy, if I were stranded on some unreachable island in the middle of nowhere?”

The task at hand was to ferret out just how much I liked a particular wine. And in more than a few cases, there were wines that met the challenge. So, too, with watches, I’ve adopted that parlor game.

How My Wine Cellar Primed Me For Watch Collecting

During a lengthy career in the wine trade, I came into possession of a number of wines. Enough to fill a walk-in closet and then a stand-alone cooler. Not to mention various wines in closets and fridges. Some of these wines I’ve held onto for 30 years or longer. In that time, I’ve learned a few things about collecting, and about myself. So, when I started to acquire watches, I knew a little about collecting things.

Disclaimer: Collecting wine and collecting watches have some distinct differences. Namely, that wine is a consumable product, which once you open the bottle, it ceases to be part of a collection. Watches are more similar to art or coins or cars or anything that doesn’t have as short of a life span as wine, which is a living product and prone to mortality. Watches, as my first post noted, can be passed down to heirs. Wine can be too, but the clock is still ticking on every bottle of wine.

Time and the Power of 10

^{♫ Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the future ♫}

I’m fascinated with numbers and the power of 10. When I first started getting into watches, much like wine, I wanted to find value in different price categories. I sought out watches that I could enjoy at all different levels and set up a up a wish list of watches at different powers of 10, namely 10², 10³ and 10⁴.

How a First Watch Turned Out to be My Grail Watch

One sunny day, while having a long al fresco lunch with a friend during the height of the Covid 19 pandemic, I noticed a slim, sleek timepiece on his wrist. "What in heaven’s name is that?" He took it off and handed it to me. “Try it on. It’s the next Royal Oak, the next Nautilus, the next Daytona!” I had no idea what he was saying, bandying about all those names. He could have easily said, "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." It would have made as much sense to me at the time.

But I did as he said, and in a quick second, my wrist transformed. All of a sudden, I wasn’t some doddering Umarell looking for an excavation site. I went from Clark Kent to Superman in an instant. I was thin, I was handsome, I was brilliant. Well, maybe the wine we were drinking had something to do with it. I was probably more actually delusional. But the watch on my left hand was all that. It was dazzling. It was the Bulgari OctoFinissimo Titanium.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Photo courtesy of Haltom's

My watch odyssey started four decades before I was born, in Fort Worth, Texas. My grandfather, newly emigrated from Sicily, was working as a cinema projectionist. He came to America in 1910 at the age of 15. By 1912, he had found work, was getting ready to find the girl he first saw when they were kids in Sicily, to marry her, now in  Texas, and start a new life. But before he did that, he walked into Haltom’s Fine Jewelers and bought a pocket watch. The watch, a Howard, had 17 jewels and cost (in 1912 dollars) $50. That’s about $1,500 is today’s money, no small sum then for a 17-year-old. He had his (and mine) initials engraved on the back, and used it for many years, moving from Fort Worth to Dallas to start his own shop (leather and shoe repair). He eventually settled his young family in southern California, where he lived until he died at the age of 97.

After he passed, my mom gave me a little box and said my grandfather wanted me to have it. It looked like rosewood and was ancient but in pristine condition. Inside the box was the watch. It was gorgeous. It wasn’t working at the time; a gear had broken. I took it eventually to the original shop where my grandfather bought it, in Fort Worth and asked about a repair. They quoted me $150, which at the time, seemed like more discretionary money than I could afford at the time. So, I put it in my home safe and let it rest there. Last year I sent it out to be repaired (now a lot more than $150!) and got it back just like new. It was my first real watch. But it wouldn’t be my last. I’d caught the watch bug.